Scarification
by Abyssal1
Summary: Harry/Lucius .... After OOTP, Harry needs to witness Lucis Malfoy chained, bound and suffering in Azkaban. But he is not prepared for the obsession that follows... ...Previously archived by Lady Lazarus - WARNING: HARD M. Mature readers only please.
1. Scarification

_(Story Notes: The 5 chapters of Scarification were written in 2003, just after the release of "Order of the Phoenix". Everything after this should be considered AU. Previously archived on Beloved Enemies and Skyehawke under the** Lady Lazarus** nic. Enjoy! - Abyssal)_

"You've made up your mind?"

"I have."

"Then remember this. There are some places in this world where its very name is like a blight on the tongue, more hateful than any curse. Do you understand that where we are going is one of these very places?"

Harry nodded, his mouth pressed tight against his teeth, his face already setting into the hard lines of adulthood. From the look that Kingsley gave him, Harry knew that the older wizard had seen the first glimpse of the man behind the boy's eyes.

_He's sixteen now. The brief sunshine of childhood has already dimmed. What kind of man will he be?_

Since their introduction, Kingsley had not yet made his mind up about Harry. Sixteen was a difficult age. One could go either way with their life, choose any number of paths. It was all he could do to guide the boy on the right one.

"I need to see _them_. Unless I know that they are suffering I won't be able to sleep at night. I see ..." for Harry the name was hard to speak, and he did so only with effort, "... Sirius' face -- always. I see the veil. I see him fall and die and the memory is poisoning me from the inside out ... Kingsley, do you understand what that's like? I need to know that they ache like I ache ..."

After listening to the boy, Kingsley's breath escaped him with a long sigh. He ran his fingers over the top of his scalp - a long time had passed since he'd had hair - and said, "Harry, I understand. That is why I've agreed to take you to Azkaban."

* * *

"He might be the son of a Death Eater, but Draco is still my cousin. I can't exactly say I don't feel pity for him. It's hard to lose a father."

Harry didn't spot an ounce of resemblance in Tonks to the blond Slytherin pure-blood. If he winced his eyes up, disregarded the dark eyes and the ever-changing hair, and concentrated only on her pale face, he might have seen a slight, slight resemblance to Draco's slim mother, who he had only seen once, and that two years ago. If anything, Tonks most resembled a very young Bellatrix Lestrange, whose wand had issued that killing blow.

Sometimes this made her hard to be around.

"He didn't lose his father. His father is still alive." Harry corrected Tonks somewhat harshly. Then he flushed with shame. He hadn't meant to snap at the young witch, but this was not the first time someone had suggested that Harry and Draco shared a loss in common.

"So - Kingsley Shacklebolt's agreed to take you to Azkaban," she said, dropping the subject of Draco. Harry did not miss how her voice had fallen to a lower timbre on mentioning the prison.

"He agreed to take me. Especially since I've made up my mind to become an Auror, he also thought it would be a good idea to know where I'll be sending _them_."

It did not escape the notice of either of them that Harry could not bring himself to say _witch_ or _wizard_. For Harry especially, to dabble in the dark branch of magic was to renounce your calling entirely and subjugate yourself to a lesser kind of existence.

Meanwhile Tonk's hair had turned a lurid, poisonous green.

"You don't approve, Tonks?"

She replied with a non-committal shrug. "It's not that I don't approve, but like the old muggle saying goes, battle ye not with monsters, lest you become a monster yourself ... and when you look into the Abyss, the Abyss also looks into you."

"I'm not battling them. I'm just going to see for myself that justice is being done."

"Suit yourself," she said, shrugging again, but would not meet Harry's eyes.

* * *

Kingsley portkeyed the pair of them not into the prison proper, but onto a wind-wracked road that fronted the huge double doors of the castle.

Looking upon the jagged structure, with its terrible dark stone battlements thrown up against a sullen, steely-grey sky, Harry wondered why they even needed Dementors. Just the _outside_ of the prison was enough to infect a person with paralysing despair.

A noxious odour of rotting seaweed and garbage was whipped up by the seething wind. Harry covered his nose with the sleeve of his robe before looking askance at Kingsley, the tall wizard shaking his head and frowning in agitation.

"Let's just get in there and get it over with," said the Auror through gritted teeth.

Bolstering themselves against the wind they struggled over the creaking bridge of the moat. The wires holding the bridge steady let out a keening wail as the wind buffeted against them. The moat water oozed and burped stinking gases. As Harry looked into the slimy, crusted liquid, he was sure he saw the lazy hump of a giant serpentine back erupting from the foul skin of the moat, curving and sliding back in with the kind of grace that suggested the creature was much, much bigger.

At the iron-mangled doors, a small porthole emerged, allowing them to step through. Though no-one had yet joined them, Harry knew that there was some powerful magic separating Kingsley and himself from the other robed people in the courtyard. These aimless figures were all meandering through the enclosed yard as if they were sleepwalking. One shabby-looking wizard with cloudy eyes shuffled towards them without even a look in their direction.

Harry waved a hand in front of the wizard's lined face. The man did not even blink.

"The incarceration enchantment makes others invisible. This is part of their punishment. For all they know they are alone here."

Harry and Kingsley turned to face a short, bearded wizard with a patch over one eye, and wearing severe black robes. At his throat was a stiffened crimson band like a clerical collar.

"I am the Warden," announced the black robed wizard. "I will be your guide."

"Are all the prisoners like this?" asked Harry, worried. Half of his desire to come here was to look upon the Death Eaters and have them look _back_ at him, to see in their eyes their guilt and the agony of imprisonment. These almost ethereal figures seemed oblivious to their fate.

To Harry's relief the Warden shook his head.

"These individuals are the lucky ones. They have a light sentence. They're allowed the privilege of being outside. Some we don't even give that choice."

"And Dementors?" Harry dug inside the folds of his robe for the comfort of his wand. There would be a silver stag waiting for any Dementor that came near him.

The Warden smiled. On a human the grin seemed twisted and wrong. It was a goblin smile, pointed and too-knowing. "We know that you have an aversion to our guardians, Harry Potter. They will stay out of your path for your visit. The wards on the prison doors are very strong. I would say sometimes that we don't even need the Dementors so much, they just add to the _atmosphere_."

Harry shuddered, and a sideways look at the tall, dark-skinned wizard next to him assured Harry that he was not the only one repulsed by this man.

With a wave of a long, flexible wand an opening appeared in the stone-paved ground, with flickering brands barely illuminating a rough-hewn stairway. With a collective breath, they followed the Warden deep into the bowels of Azkaban.

* * *

Only Kingsley's reputation as an Auror allowed them to retain their wands as they entered the deep, high security sections of the wizard prison.

Harry didn't quite believe that he'd have been able to bear these claustrophobia-inducing walls otherwise, not the full gibbets with their rotting bodies, not the dark, pitted and barred insets in the walls where unknowable things sobbed and gasped and died. He held his wand so tightly the holly handle was slippery with the sweat off his palm. How much of the prison was real, and how much of it was the _atmosphere_ Harry did not care to know. For the first time he regretted his need to come here.

As the trio ventured further into the Azkaban labyrinth they passed countless heavy, impenetrable wood-panelled doors. Pitiful clawed hands would protrude from the grilled watch-holes, supplicating, begging. Frail, croaking voices floated from the darkness.

_mercy_

_not my fault_

_forgive me_

No sooner would Harry shy away from one set of grasping digits then another hand would reach out to clutch out at him and hiss for redemption. In the end it was all he could do but splash along the central gutter of the corridor, just out of reach.

The Warden grinned at Harry's discomfort, and gestured with his thin, whip like wand at a row of doors.

"Your Death Eaters."

Kingsley stopped, and nudged Harry forward.

"Go, go look boy."

Harry could not help but think of Sirius. Had he been kept here, in one of these cells, in the dozen years he had spent as Azkaban's guest? How had he borne this terrible place?

Harry's breath caught in his throat as he passed each viewing porthole. The pathetic robed figures in the bare cells stared back at him. Some he recognised because he saw their sons nearly every day at school - Crabbe, Goyle, Nott. In the others it was the eyes, eyes that had glared from behind Death Eater masks, that stirred his memory.

At first Harry believed he saw flashes of recognition in the pinched, starved faces. Slowly he began to realise that each one of them had been broken by the combined weight of charm and despondency. He might have been a Dementor for all they knew him.

Somewhere between disappointment and satisfaction, he was about to turn back when he stopped, frowned in concern, then searched each cell again.

After Bellatrix, there was only one other who had a direct role in his godfather's death.

"Where is _he_?"

"He who?"

"Malfoy."

The name was like a curse word. Harry couldn't help but wince in speaking the syllables.

"Ah," said the Warden. "Lucius Malfoy. Yes, he presented a _special_ kind of challenge for us."

"What do you mean, a challenge?"

"Well, he is no ordinary wizard. A master of the Dark Arts, first disciple to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named ... Malfoy proved very difficult to break. We had to find an alternate punishment for him."

Harry strode up to the Warden. "What kind of alternate punishment?"

The Warden simpered. "There are some things not to be spoken of in polite company."

"Show me."

"Harry..." started Kingsley, worried. "You've seen enough."

"No! I want to see where Malfoy his and what's been done to him. I want to be sure!"

The Warden met Harry's gaze for the longest time before he bobbed his ugly, one-eyed head. "Certainly. Follow me then."

Harry had to jog to catch up with the Warden, who despite his short stature and the dark, slippery floor of the prison was surprisingly nimble. They moved down several more flights of stairs, and the air took on a colder, damper quality. The dingy cells weremore often as not empty. It seemed that there was a level of sentence reserved for a special kind of magical crime, a punishment so onerous that not even Death Eaters were down sent here.

After a short time Harry looked behind him and found that they'd lost Kingsley. Now he was totally dependent on the Warden for direction.

"...you might not find him tractable," the Warden was saying as they approached a cell at the far end of a long, noxiously dank tunnel. "We've not managed to drag good behaviour out of our guest yet."

Despite his loathing of the elder Malfoy, Harry couldn't help feeling a grudging admiration for someone who had refused to be broken under the worst Azkaban had to offer. As far as he knew, only Sirius had managed to put up much of a fight.

However the bundle of rags curled up at the corner of the cell was nothing to admire. If there was a man under here once, it was obvious to Harry that the humanity had long ago been bled away.

The Warden opened the door.

"Malfoy. You have a visitor."

The rag bundle did not stir.

"There's a Mister Potter here to see you."

Without warning the rags were cast off and the prisoner spring from his crouch and lunged at them, jerking short only when the chains reached their full distance. Harry gasped and leapt back.

"You," snarled Malfoy, his silver eyes almost luminous in the gloom. "Don't think I've forgotten you, boy.!"

Beneath the grime of his bare chest and arms, Harry could see that the straining musculature had not yet attained the slackness of someone locked up and inactive for a long period of time. Malfoy's eyes were not clouded like the other convicts, but gleamed with a powerful magic. No doubt they could spit sparks, sear him open with a look. Despite his alarm, Harry felt strangely exited at having this dangerous man chained up before him, so close, yet so tantalisingly out of reach.

The entire structures of power had been reversed in this room. Harry was no longer a child and Malfoy was not someone who had control - physical or magical - over him.

Harry stepped closer, and Malfoy's head darted forward like that of a snake's, a warning hiss escaping from his bared teeth. When Harry flinched, the Death Eater let out a snort that could have been a laugh. Malfoy had not changed. One nostril was caked with dried blood, an unhealed cut sliced in half one eyebrow and his hair had darkened with dirt, but his appearance had altered very little. He had not even grown a beard, as the wards in Azkaban didn't allow a magical person to alter their appearance.

"What has been done to him?" whispered Harry to the one-eyed Warden.

"Everything," replied the Warden. "We cause him pain and heal him of the most exquisite tortures, and yet he refuses to submit. Save a Dementor's kiss, nothing will break him."

The Warden licked his lips, lasciviously, as if the idea of the Dementor's kiss gave him pleasures that none could name.

Harry let his eyes meet Malfoy's wild ones, then slide over the rest of his near naked body. There was a strength there Harry had come across so rarely in others, the way the muscles segued into each other under the taut, famine-cut skin. The _lumos_ in the cell's far corner spat and sizzled in the presence of heady, dark magic.

The light cast into sharp definition Malfoy's arms and shoulders and belly, the still-tight riding breeches he had been wearing on the day of his arrest, the bulge in the crotch. So beautiful, and so deadly.Without realising it Harry too had been licking his lips and swallowing the lump that had developed in his dry throat.

Despite the evidence of magic torture and magic healing - there were still patches of discolouration on Malfoy's skin that could not be attributed to dirt - the wizard held himself with a kind of insolent pride that shrieked _do your worst_. Further pain would not diminish the confronting, hateful glare in those unrelenting grey eyes.

If Harry wanted to have any effect on this man, he needed to approach him in other ways.

Harry moved outside the cell to speak to the Warden.

"I want him to wash. But not here. Somewhere cleaner."

The Warden looked mortified.

"But the current course of his punishment requires that he suppurate in his own filth here..."

Harry met the Warden's single eye with his own. "And _my_ punishment requires that he clean up."

"You're no Auror. You cannot order this."

Harry felt a new authority welling in him. He had not yet tested the boundaries of his fame and the thrall that he had over others. After Voldemort, it was he who now engendered the most fearful respect in others. His fame had given him an uncertain, mysterious quality. No-one was sure yet in which way he would turn, and few were brave enough to test him.

"I may not be an Auror now, but there are not so many years in between today and the time I will be." Harry was secretly amazed at the rough, masculine voice that burst from his throat. Even Malfoy stopped straining against his irons, and hunched down like an animal who has heard an unexpected noise. "I'm wondering if you will still be here to tell me then what you are telling me now."

After a tense few seconds the Warden shrugged. "There is an old shower room near here. I'm sure it will ... suit."

"And I want to be left alone with the prisoner."

"If you think your magic skills adequate to hold him..."

Harry's silence was answer enough.

* * *

The shower room had not been used since long before any of them had  
been born. If there had been a layer of enamel on the tiles, years and years of neglect had gradually worn whatever original colour had been present away.

"It is the magic," said the Warden. "Captured, restrained magic is corrosive and poisonous. In time it can wear down the very stone of the walls."

Flaking, rusted water-pipes criss-crossed overhead, occasionally terminating in a decomposed shower-rose, suspended over a grate in the gently sloping stone floor. The controls for the water flow were lined up along the far wall, leaving the prisoner at the guard's mercy.

The only illumination came from high windows inset with ancient, clouded glass.

"This will do," said Harry, feeling an odd chill as he contemplated what could be done here.

_battle ye not with monsters, lest you become a monster yourself_

He was not cruel. He just wanted to...

_hurt_

...talk to him and achieve some...

_revenge_

...peace.

A pair of masked, robed guards - perhaps some of the few  
non-dementor workers apart from Azkaban's Warden - dragged a non-compliant Malfoy into the shower-room.

Harry watched as the dirty, filth-caked man put up the appearance of being in some state of near catatonia, yet still be perfectly aware of what was happening. This was a place new for him. Already the older wizard was steeling himself for some other kind of torture, binding himself with whatever power he had left.

"Chain him under that shower over there, then leave us." Harry ordered, trying to retain the sense of command in his voice. He might have fantasised a hundred times at having Malfoy under his domination, but now in the cold reality he could feel his resolve weakening.

In his fantasies, Lucius Malfoy had been whimpering and crying and begging to exchange places with Sirius Black, screaming for death. Not silent and watchful like this, those arrogant quicksilver eyes slitted in Harry's direction, as if Malfoy's situation and Malfoy's chains were mere technicalities to be erased with a word.

The guards took one leg-iron, and chained Malfoy by one ankle to a U-bolt set into the stone floor. The bracelets were taken from him, leaving his arms free.

Malfoy allowed himself the weakness of rubbing the chafed, weeping marks around his wrists before looking around him, taking in the old, grimy walls and floor, the shower equipment, the runnels and grates that could drain away water...or blood.

He then returned to Harry, pressed against one wall. Malfoy sensed the young wizard's trepidation, and smirked, opening a just-healed split lip. A drop of blood appeared on his chin.

"I can see you enjoy seeing me like this." The smirk transformed into a scowl. "You'll get no pleasure from me. This is nothing. You are nothing."

Malfoy then spat in Harry's direction, his faced creased in loathing.

Harry quickly stood upright and said, "Take-"

The dryness in his throat had returned, making his voice crack mid-sentence. Silently cursing, he stood closer to Malfoy and said loudly, "Take off your clothes."

"I haven't got any more to take off."

"Your strides. Take them off."

Malfoy paused only for a moment. A puzzled shadow flicked over his battered face, before the blank, arrogant antipathy returned, and he pulled off the tattered riding breeches. The garment tangled up in the U-bolt.

Harry did not mean to stare, but his eyes rutted over the bared flesh. There was more evidence of bruises and not-quite healed injuries, but the long muscles of Malfoy's legs were unspoilt and defined, flowing lines leading up to...

...Harry wanted to pull his gaze away but he could not, for even flaccid Malfoy's thick, veined cock was impressive, much more impressive than those of the other boy's in the school changing room, the place where he had started to realise his sexual leanings followed a bent path.

Harry realised his mouth had dropped open slightly on seeing Lucius Malfoy's aberrant anatomy. To distract Malfoy from his constant stare Harry struck the lever for the shower.

At first there was nothing. Then the pipework began to groan and rattle audibly, knocking and clattering overhead as if a whole boggart tribe was tumbling through the thin bores. With a loud splatter the shower-head disgorged a deluge of orange-brown water. Malfoy let out a grunt of surprise as he was drenched in the dirty liquid. The water pressure was still good after all this time, and soon the water began to run clear.

Malfoy stood, slightly bedraggled in the middle of the relentless flow, refusing to alter his wary stance, to give in to what must be the sheer relief of being surrounded in lukewarm water after Merlin knows how long he'd gone without.

Harry looked around at the lip of tile under the water levers. He found an old dried cake of soap and a nearly hairless scrubbing brush that seemed as if it were really meant for floors, not people.

He slid both objects over to Malfoy.

"Wash." he said.

Malfoy did not move.

"Go on."

The pale wizard's eyes narrowed, before he scooped the soap and brush up. He turned his back to Harry, as if this act required a modicum of privacy.

Harry was almost about to order Malfoy to turn around, but the sight of the muscled back converging into narrow hips and the beautiful, rounded arse made him forget what he was about to say. Malfoy worked over his body with ritualistic precision, scrubbing the matted dirt from his pale blond head, the snags and snarls washing away with the water, then moving over his broad shoulders, taking care not to peel off an old scab that had been hiding under the dirt, over his chest - Harry was almost ready to tell him to turn around but did not want to spoil the view he had - then his sides and back, the soap suds curling down over Malfoy's arse leaving slow, shiny trails like saliva from a long kiss.

Malfoy was flexible enough, and the brush was large enough for him to reach those difficult parts of his back. Harry found himself wondering whether he would have offered to step forward, ignoring the danger, and offer to scrub his back had Malfoy not been able to reach.

_Stop it!_ Harry warned himself. _He's your enemy and you're not here to make his stay any easier._

Malfoy then began to smear and lather the soap what could only be his groin and between his arse cheeks, spending what an inordinate amount of time on his intimate areas. Harry found that he had begun to get uncomfortably hot under his robes.

Malfoy moved down to his thighs, lathering the soap in long, patient strokes. Harry couldn't help but mentally replacing Malfoy's hands with his own. A disturbing thought came to him - he could have had Malfoy completely bound if he had so desired. He could have been the one feeling and touching the soap-slick masculine body, sliding his thumbs into the deep junction between thigh muscles, over those hips, subject that blood-heavy cock to his broom-callused hands.

Harry's breath was already coming in short gasps. He was aroused by the sight of Malfoy like this, naked and vulnerable yet still exuding power and confidence.

Harry turned off the water.

The shower rose gurgled to a trickle, drops of water still coursing  
down Malfoy's pale back.

"I'm not finished."

"Turn around," said Harry, and winced when he realised the arousal was painfully obvious in his hoarse and breathless voice.

Malfoy turned around. Clean, he was beautiful, with the lean proportions of a Muggle statue. The torture marks on him seemed like senseless acts of vandalism. How could anyone desecrate something so physically beautiful?

The grey eyes were still insolent. They did not miss Harry's flushed cheeks and moist, parted lips.

"Do you want to come here and touch me, then?" the older wizard teased in a low, husky voice, heavy with malice, running the side of his thumb over a nipple sharpened by the cold. The thumb trailed down to his hip, and the indentation of muscle at his naked groin.

The offer had been made in sarcasm - Malfoy's way of maintaining control in an uncontrollable situation. Harry knew that if he so much as touched Lucius Malfoy the older wizard would overpower him and possibly - most likely - use him as a hostage to escape.

But for an awful moment Harry had needed all his willpower to restrain himself from lurching towards the naked man and tonguing the erect nipple savagely.

Already he had begun to feel his own prick stirring in his trousers. Each time he breathed, it seemed the fabric would chafe over him and inflame him more. Harry had not expected this reaction. It both excited and terrified him. He was mere moments of fleeing this room and trying to find somewhere to relieve himself of this building pressure, and let his mind roil with fantasies of clawing and biting the tight flesh of this man, feasting on the musky taste of that magnificent cock.

The impossible realities of his fantasy made Harry almost want to cry out.

Words burst from him instead. "Touch yourself, Malfoy!"

"I shall not," said the pale wizard.

Harry grappled for his wand and held it out in front of him, the end trembling from the keening of his aroused nerves. "Touch yourself, or I _will_ hurt you and _make_ you do it."

Malfoy glowered at Harry in defiance even as his still-soapy hand slipped down to his groin. He did not even avert his eyes from Harry's own as he took hold of the thick organ and began to slide the slick palm over the veined shaft, challenging Harry to break the gaze first.

"Would you like to know sort of thing that will give _me_ pleasure?" hissed Malfoy as he slowly stroked his rapidly lengthening and thickening cock. "Tearing those robes from your body, throwing you face down on that floor, naked and wet on the floor, powerless to everything but what I demand from you...look at me Potter, see how hard I am when I think of raping you and fucking you so hard it'll be you that begs me to stop..."

Malfoy was fully erect now, and Harry's gaze slipped from those intimidating eyes and mocking, threatening mouth, following a large droplet of water as it skidded over Malfoy's pectoral muscle and down his belly to his leisurely moving fist. The swollen glans shone in the filtered light, fat and delicious. Harry could not pull his gaze away, felt saliva flood his mouth, had to grab hold of a vertical water pipe so as not to crawl to Malfoy and grab his thighs and slide the engorged shaft between his lips...

"Can you feel me?" Malfoy growled, his own voice husky with need. "Can you feel me inside you? Can you feel me fucking you...?"

Harry only nodded, mashing his fists into his robe so that he couldn't touch his burning, throbbing prick straining within the prison of cloth. Each time Malfoy's palm pulled down to the root of his shaft, and his glans reared up, gleaming with soap and pre-come, Harry felt his own body quiver as if penetrated by some invisible force. His heartbeat roared in his ears, his legs were shaking, barely holding him upright.

Harry's only consolation was that Malfoy was not far from climax. Malfoy's free hand had seized hold of the shower rose above him for support, and that once conceited face was wracked with concentration and pleasure-pain. But the grey eyes did not once leave Harry, for it was Harry that Malfoy was thinking of as he stroked his gorgeously huge cock to climax, it was a shared image of Harry being thoroughly impaled, Malfoy's organ buried deep into Harry's arse, the pale wizard's lean, strong body grinding into Harry's flesh, Malfoy's thighs behind Harry's own, driving him to orgasm, Malfoy's tongue and teeth and hot breath...

"Can...you... feel..._oh Harry_..."

Malfoy let out a tormented groan that seemed to have been dragged up from his very core. A spurt of pearl erupted from the head of his blood-heavy prick and spattered across the dark ground.

Harry's untouched cock responded in simpatico. Instantly he jerked as if a current of dark magic had been thrust between is legs. Sticky warmth filled Harry's groin. He fell to his knees, bowed his head forwards and shuddered through the aftershocks of climax.

_he'd said...oh Harry_

"Lucius..." he moaned, and the name suited in his mouth, no longer a curse, but a necessary counter-spell that needed to be spoken, else the speaker died.

Feeling utterly, utterly unsatisfied by his unbidden peak Harry kissed the stone floor with a mewling cry of frustration, licked up Malfoy's come as if he could attain some closeness to his untouchable lover, anything, anything at all to approximate the taste of skin and saliva and sweat, to assuage the hunger that flared in his stomach, his still-erect penis.

He savoured the strong musky flavour of the spunk as if were the most exceptional delicacy. He still wanted more, he was still groaning for more...

Harry raised his head to find that Lucius Lucius, now? had been as startled as he to have called out Harry's name.

The blond wizard was now holding onto the shower rose with both hands, limp and trembling, breathing hard from what had undoubtedly one of the most powerful orgasms of his life.

Whether it was the prison, his hatred of Harry or the strength of his fantasy to subjugate the boy into violent unrestrained sex, or having verbalised that secret desire in front of his would-be victim without inhibition, Lucius Malfoy's whole body had been overwhelmed by an instant of pure, white-hot ecstasy. The loss of that feeling exhausted him, leaving him with an emotion that could only be akin to anguish.

Now when he looked at Harry on his knees, utterly submissive, tonguing the come from the stone, he was shaken and wary and gods! aching with lust.

Harry saw the change in Malfoy's eyes. Rising to his unsteady feet, Harry now realised that he had affected the Death Eater in a way that no amount of pain or torture could ever have. Lucius' cry still echoed in his ears.

_oh harry_

A pair of voices were echoing down the corridor outside the shower-room. The booming voice belonged to Kingsley, the apologetic one to the Warden. Kingsley was accusing the Azkaban administrator of stealing Harry away. They were not far.

He cast one last look at Lucius Malfoy. A curious feeling wormed into Harry when saw the wizard standing slouched and beaten, his arms now wrapped tightly about his chest as if he were afraid something might fall out.

Harry couldn't comprehend what brought on such a pang of guilt. Malfoy had practically killed Sirius and deserved nothing more than to be detested. But it was as if by dragging this small secret out into the open, by making Malfoy utter those two words in an unguarded moment, Harry had destroyed and degraded something noble and proud and terrible all at once.

Harry backed away from the chained man, frightened himself. What had happened between them? They had both scarred the other. He stumbled from the room, sticky and uncomfortable, but feeling nothing that approached the loss in his soul.

TBC - "Obsession"


	2. Obsession

* * *

They say there is only one thing worse than dying. It's the coming back to life.

* * *

Sometimes Harry believed that he didn't _live_ the six weeks at Number Four, he hibernated. At the end of the school year he died, and when he boarded the crimson train at Kings Cross he was born again. In between was Purgatory, a half-life meant to be existed, but not lived. He slept, ate and breathed. Everything else was incidental until term began.

Incidental that is, until now.

Harry blinked up at the ceiling. Huge and blurry without his glasses, the mildew stains in the corners had taken on the shapes of teeth, claws, heads without eyes. The sunlight steamed through the curtains leaving slashes of brilliance along the floor. His skin was sweaty and horrid from the stuffy room.

The sounds of normality forced their way in through the window like uninvited guests. The drone of a neighbour's lawnmower, the barking of the other neighbours terrier, the distant hum of the motorway, the clatter of Aunt Petunia's dishwasher.

All in all was the overriding sensation that he had woken up three weeks too early.

The last two weeks had been exquisitely difficult. Difficult, because Uncle Vernon had made several sly comments about Harry's sudden lassitude. He would have made more, crueler observations had Aunt Petunia not said "Don't forget his _friends,_ dear," through rigidly clenched and smiling teeth.

Exquisite, because of the nights. Harry might have been subdued during the day, but at night, in the moments between sleeping and waking his mind was restless, filling him with all sorts of imaginings, sordid and sexual, leaving him panting and gasping as if all the air had gone out of the room. Every night now Harry had woken up drenched in sweat, his sheets stained, woken tired from a disturbing dream of skin, water, silver eyes and kisses upon wet stone.

A fortnight ago he had looked into darkness, and the darkness had looked back into him. He'd been given a glimpse of his secret self.

He was no longer a child. A child wouldn't be so overcome by erotic need that even Dudley's maleness was distracting. This otherwise hidden part of him had suddenly flowered into full rapacious bloom, making him more and less the boy he used to be. Sometimes the thoughts that filled him were sinfully delicious in their agony.

But most of the time they were just very, very distracting.

* * *

Even worse, Harry came to discover, was his new reaction towards the males he did feel warmth towards. His brief visit to the Weasley house confused him. Fred and George. Ron. He found he couldn't think properly when they came too close. His flesh would quiver and a weight would settle in his belly. He would contrive excuses to touch them - on the arms, the shoulders, or the small of the back.

Strongest of all was the lurch of yearning that came over him when Charlie made an unexpected visit the Burrow.

Harry couldn't help but spend the day staring at the shortest and stockiest of the Weasley brothers. Charlie's eyes had had a kind of faraway wildness, and his wind-roughened face was prematurely lined, the skin on his nose and cheeks as shiny-red as his hair. He was a man who had stood in the shadow of terrible lizards and wrested control of them, who had endured a storm of dragon's breath - the corrolis of fire and poison that will sear a person to ash where he stands.

When Charlie noticed Harry's intense attention upon him over the dinner table, he raised an eyebrow with good-humoured understanding. He winked at Harry, gave him a smile. Harry squirmed.

The next afternoon, when a simple hug turned into a clumsy kiss, Charlie couldn't help but ponder on the change that had come over Ron's normally reserved young friend.

Charlie returned the kiss long enough to be friendly. Harry was mauling Charlie as if he were starving. This was not love, but something else. With great gentleness Charlie took the boy's shoulders and moved Harry away from him.

"Dragon musth, eh?" he said to Harry.

"Excuse me?"

"Musth. Dragons are all in rut at the moment. Their bloody mating hormones soak right into human skin. It's worse than garlic."

Harry knew it hadn't been the Dragon pheromones on Charlie that had made Harry grab Ron's older brother into a rather desperate embrace. With a dragon handler's rough arrogance, that touch of danger, Charlie reminded him of someone else.

Charlie saw the confusion in Harry's eyes, and understood straight away what was bothering the boy. He was never so old not to remember what it was like to be sixteen.

"Got a bit of a crush on someone have we?"

Harry blushed. "Not you..."

Charlie laughed. "I knew that. He must be okay if I'm the substitute, eh?"

In any other situation Harry would have laughed at Charlie's ego. Instead he felt his features freeze over into a rictus.

"He's not okay."

Charlie peered into Harry's face and frowned at the shadow that had passed.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Harry shook his head. They might have been alone in the rambling old house, but the chance was too great that someone would apparate into the middle of the room while Harry was pouring out his secrets. He knew too well - when you lose a secret, you lose a part of yourself.

"Well..." said Charlie, "Perhaps you want to tell me who it is?"

Harry recoiled from Charlie in alarm. "I couldn't!"

Charlie studied Harry. He had worked with non-humans for a long time. In some ways was better at non-verbal communication than many others of his species. These cues were vitally important, especially to a handler at the end of several tons of enraged lizard. For Charlie it had made him extremely sensitive to the unspoken reply.

When Charlie saw Harry's shock, and noted the way the blood drained from his face, the number of people who could have caused this panic reduced the likely list considerably. The culprit would not be a boy Harry's age, for Harry had clearly displayed a preference for older men. Not someone kindly and benign, for Charlie knew he himself looked dangerous, scarred and burned from his dragons. Many lovers had commented on his fire-kissed face and his rough, callused hands, his powerful, stocky body with a delicious frisson of fear.

Certainly someone whose name could not be spoken...?

No, not that either. _He_ was too old, sixty-five and monstrous. Harry still had an appreciation for beauty. Somebody very close in kind, then.

Mentally, Charlie shook his head. Logic reduced the list too far, down to one man. That particular person was locked away in Azkaban, unreachable and evil. Harry would have had as much to do with Lucius Malfoy as he would have with the one who'd killed his parents.

But and but. Charlie knew that it was his right as a dragon handler to make a wrong call sometimes. For all that Harry was a kid like his youngest brother, he was also the Boy-Who-Lived, and that gave him - what others so aptly described as - an unknown quantity.

"This person," asked Charlie carefully, "Does he return your feelings?"

Again, Harry was evasive. "I don't know. Maybe if I let him."

"But you won't let him ... or you can't?"

"Both." Harry was already looking about, trying to find an excuse to worm out of this conversation. He suspected that Charlie suspected.

"You know," said Charlie carefully, wanting to tailor his advice to every eventuality, "You do yourself no favours by leaving yourself in limbo like this."

"I know."

Charlie withdrew from his vest a curved dagger, a wickedly sharp little dagger cut from one of the spurs on a Norwegian Rigdeback ruff. The handle sparkled with a spiral pattern of semi-precious stones.

"Harry, let me tell you a story. See this? This is a strap cutter. All of us handlers carry these knives. They're the only thing apart from magic that will slice open dragon-hide ropes." Charlie handed it to Harry, let him heft the surprising lightness of the blade.

"It has never happened to me, but ... sometimes a handler would get himself tangled in his own ropes and stuck fast to a wild dragon. He had a terrible choice to make. He either cut the ropes and hope he would fall to safety without the beast making a meal of him ... or he would remain trapped, and stay on that dragon until he died."

As Harry made to give back the knife Charlie shook his head. "See, I was a bit too clever. I made mine into a permanent portkey, it takes me anywhere I want to go."

"Anywhere...?"

"As I figure, you also need to work out whether you want to cut the ropes or stay on the dragon."

Harry didn't quite know what to say. Charlie's generosity was a part of him as he was part of his family, but not when the second-elder Weasley brother seemed to know exactly where Harry's predicaments were.

"Now get out of here. Mum isn't expecting you until dinner."

* * *

Harry didn't go anywhere. Not at first. He lay on the spare bed in Ron's room and twirled the blade between his fingers, marvelling at the glass-shard clarity of the ruff-spike and the way it inflicted paper-cuts to anywhere on his skin he tested.

He tried and failed not to think about with the wizard prison, the massive granite walls that he was sure could resist even the very end of the world, the cavernous roots of the dungeons and catacombs buried into the loamy earth, and the _person_ kept in the very depths.

At the thought of that person he could already sense the familiar ache in his groin.

Harry rolled onto his side, hating himself for this reaction whenever he thought of the imprisoned Death Eater. Manifesting any form of desire towards Lucius Malfoy was, to him, just about the ultimate betrayal of Sirius' memory. His godfather would never have stood for such nonsense.

He would have told him to cut the damn rope.

* * *

Hedwig returned at midnight, and sat upon the windowsill patiently, her white feathers almost obscured against the unseasonal frost haze on the glass.

Ron only murmured in his sleep when Harry let her in. He saw the dark parchment tied onto her leg, and it did not escape his notice that the fibres steadily darkened as he fumbled with the string attaching the message to his owl.

Harry had only a few seconds to read the spidery handwriting before the parchment turned to ash and dissolved in his fingers.

_ Mr Potter:  
Further to your visiting request. ____As you are aware non-relatives are forbidden access to our high-security inmates. But taking into account the little chat we had previously, I am sure discretion can be held on both our parts. I will be expecting you tonight. ______Warden - Azkaban Prison_

Harry's fingers still tingled from the residual magic, and he seriously debated whether he should wake up Ron and tell him where he was going.

He decided against it. What he was about to do now was no business of Ron's. Besides, his friend would do everything in his power to keep Harry from going, even if it meant using magic himself.

Harry quickly dressed and dug out Charlie's knife. The shard reflected the glow from the brazier with a strange, kinked light. Harry steeled himself for the worst.

"Azkaban."

* * *

There was a storm out in the ocean that night, the air roaring with thunder and the great battering swells of water plunging against the jagged cliffs. The rain darkened the ominous stone of the prison until it was almost invisible, turning the edifice into an immensity blacker than the ravaged night-time sky.

The Warden was waiting for him in the shelter of the great, keyholed entrance. The Azkaban wards would not allow anyone to turn up - or leave by that matter - unannounced.

Harry drew his robe about him tighter, and met the warden's knowing smile with a cool one in return.

"Oh come now Mister Potter," said the Warden, flashing a complicit grin from his black beard, "You know as well as I do that a young lad like you is testing the water in his...preferences. For I was not so much younger than you when I discovered the sweet pleasure of being the one to wield the whip and the blade."

Harry did not acknowledge him.

"Talking about blades, I'll be needing that portkey of yours. You'll get it back when you're ..._ finished with him_."

Harry again felt a slimy chill of revulsion. His only consolation was that this would be the last time he would have to come here. Tonight he would end his unwanted fixation with Lucius Malfoy, and bring closure to this need for revenge.

He handed Charlie's knife over the Warden and followed him into the Azkaban dungeons.

Despite the depth of the structure, the pounding sea against the cliff seemed to reverberate through stone like a slow heartbeat, a relentless driving rhythm.

"We had him ... cleaned ... for you," said the Warden, pausing at just the places to make it seem that much more had been done to ensure Malfoy's co-operation. A purplish tongue licked dry lips. Harry suspected that the Warden would arrange any indignity on Harry's request.

"I don't intend to _do_ anything to him. I just want to talk to him, that is all."

The Warden shrugged, as if he was a little offended by Harry's rejection of the trouble he'd taken. "You might change your mind. Our visitors nearly always do."

After several minutes of descent into the dungeon, the Warden arranged himself outside a heavy wooden door.

"He's in here. You have an hour. I'll be waiting up at the watchtower for when you ... return."

The Warden pushed open the door and made to leave.

"Hang on, said Harry. Aren't you afraid he'll walk out?"

"Oh no, I assure you, he's very securely tied down."

The Warden gave another one of his horrid, knowing smiles, before leaving the way they had come.

On stepping into the cell, Harry understood what the Warden meant. The stone room was round and bare, lit by flickering brands that burnt without smoke. The shifting yellow light revealed a complicatedly adjustable wood-carved chair, canted slightly backwards and decorated - if that was the right word - with cast-iron rings and hooks of the type to secure both mundane and magical ropes.

In the chair - and now Harry's heart thrummed faster - an almost naked figure was bound, still-damp hair flowing over his shoulders taking on the colour of that cold fire, the skin touched with gold, the defiant arms constrained rigidly down his sides, modesty and vulnerability conveyed in a strip of cloth across his hips.

The bulge under the cloth served only to intensify the previous memory of Harry's last visit.

The Warden might have tried to reduce Malfoy's physical presence by having him tied into a sitting position, but had failed miserably. Even bound, Malfoy exuded arrogance. When the door slammed shut the prisoner made no sign of being aware that Harry was in the room with him, as if it were beneath his contempt to acknowledge Harry's existence.

Harry walked around behind Malfoy, wanting to calm his breathing and damp the heat that had risen in his face. A fresh welt was visible on Malfoy's back, magically healed but still obvious. The original injury had clearly been a lot worse, possibly caused by the guards trying to secure Malfoy into this position in the first place.

Harry felt his hand lift as of its own violition. He intended to snatch the offending limb away, but his own sense whispered to him: _Malfoy's tied down. He can't do anything to you._

He reached out his fingers and came into contact with the marked shoulder so softly that at first Malfoy didn't seem to register his being touched.

When he did, he jerked under Harry's fingers and twisted away as far as his bonds would allow.

"Don't touch me Potter," Malfoy snarled. "Get your filthy hands off me."

Harry stepped back, then wished he hadn't. He was the one standing. He was the one in control.

Harry walked quickly around to face the pale wizard and opened his mouth to speak, to rail and shout and accuse and get it over with so that he could leave this accursed place for good.

But when he saw the body, so bold despite the position it had been tied into Harry couldn't speak. He was seized by those insolent silver eyes, the sneer on Malfoy's lips, the way his arms were still thick with muscle, cut and defined.

Then there was that part of Malfoy hidden from him by the thin cloth.

As Malfoy breathed, there was a corresponding movement to the lump under the cloth. Harry was no longer confined by the amount of space he needed to stay away from Malfoy. Yes, he had come here to finish things, but there was no reason he could not look one more time. In the last fortnight his most sharp, intense climaxes had occurred as he dwelt on his memory of Malfoy's huge prick, imagining its forbidding size in Harry's hand, betwenn his lips, in his most intimate places.

Perhaps he could look and imagine just this part of his enemy's anatomy in the future without thinking of the enemy. He could take a mental picture and keep it to himself, an image to be brought out at night, in the privacy of his bed.

As Harry stepped closer it also occurred to him that if he remembered Malfoy this way, then every other lover he would ever have would be spoilt for him, because he had chosen as his ideal something quite incredible and unattainable. He had a jolt of precognition, seeing himself in the embrace of a stranger-lover in the far future, many many years from now, and his traitorous mind skipping back to this very moment.

Harry paused, but only for a second.

Malfoy didn't say anything as Harry pulled the cloth away. A low growl of outrage escaped him.

Yes, the organ was just as Harry remembered. Darker than the rest of his skin, heavy and forbidding. Harry blushed at an obvious thought ... what would it feel like? Would it be soft skin, or stretched hard as the leather around a bludger?

Malfoy was in no position not to notice Harry's silent deliberation on his nakedness. He clearly took offence to the being made such an object of attention.

"What is the point of your vile gaping? As you see my hands have been tied so I may not perform for your amusement." He snagged his wrists against his bonds as he spoke, making his request in such a slimy, condescending tone that Harry was under no illusion as to what Malfoy thought of him. "Perhaps you should unbind me and see where the fun leads, hmm?"

Harry knew that were the bonds gone, he would have asked Malfoy to perform for him again. It was not the flaccid prick he wanted to see, but the erect one, hard and threatening and desirable, the head glistening in these firebrands as if it were on the point of penetration. Harry closed his eyes momentarily as the image seared into his mind, then opened them.

"You said my name last time," Harry said quietly. "When you came."

"I did not."

"You did."

Malfoy tilted his beautiful head up slightly. Oh, the man was so arrogant in the face of this confinement, so defiantly proud. "I am not going to get drawn into this argument," he said with finality. "Visit your torture upon me Potter, and then leave, for every minute I have a visit - invited or none - the Warden makes me suffer an equal time in compensation."

The ghosts of old injuries of Malfoy's skin told Harry that he was telling the truth.

The sound of the sea made the caverns of Azkaban grumble in commiseration. The low, subsonic pulse of the waves against the island affected Harry physically, made him more edgy, sensitive to his own skin. He was also terribly aware that on speaking to Malfoy and gazing upon him, he had developed an erection that now bent uncomfortably against the front of his trousers.

Malfoy's silver eyes glowered as Harry adjusted himself in front of the restrained man. Harry tried hard not to tremble from the contact as he manipulated himself to a kinder, less painful position._ Hold on_ he scolded himself. _This meeting is almost over, you'll go back to the bathroom in the Burrow and drag this scene into your steadily growing bank of fantasies that involve Lucius Malfoy..._

Harry had to swallow, as a flush of warmth rose from his belly and groin, culminating in an anxious lump in his throat. This conversation had better be short, as he didn't know he could hold out being so painfully hard.

Malfoy watched Harry touch his fly and move the contents within, noted duly the dark rise of lust in the boy's face, and came to the wrong conclusion.

"If you put that little prick anywhere near me I'll bite it off."

Harry was rather affronted, as one particular fantasy had involved Malfoy on his knees before him, his aristocratic mouth filled with Harry, his tongue swirling enthusiastically against his glans and...

Again that flush of heat, this time scouring through his limbs like an obscene fire. Harry couldn't help but let out a gasp. He was so close. Malfoy was so close.

The most important thing was that Malfoy was bound up tight against that chair with dragon-hide rope and there was no way, save for Charlie's dagger and some hefty spell-work, that they would be untied.With slow steps Harry moved closer to Malfoy, close enough so that he could reach out and touch that skin if he so chose.

He chose.

As Harry stretched out his hand he could see the imperceptible flinch behind Malfoy's reserve. In the past month no human touch would have come to the man without agony, and Malfoy's reaction was instinctive. He shied away from Harry's finger whispering down his cheek, his nostrils flaring and his eyes closing, as if willing himself to endure the inevitable blow or slap.

When Harry lay his palm on Malfoy's cool shoulder Harry felt the deep tremor passing through Malfoy's body just like the constant thunder of the sea. He moved his hand over Malfoy's pectoral muscle, his thumb just touching the nipple and felt the heartbeat thrumming there. Amazing that Malfoy could be so wracked with apprehension and yet not show the tiniest bit in his manner or his voice.

Strange, that he could hold so much hate for this man but couldn't bring himself to hurt him.

What happened next was a decision he allowed his own body to make, his consciousness following along for the ride. He slid his hands down Malfoy's long thighs and parted them at the knees. Malfoy's ankles were bound to the chair, so he couldn't kick out at Harry, and a prisoner knows too well the consequences of not complying when there is naked vulnerability to consider. Malfoy turned his head in denial of what ever Harry was planning. His eyes were still closed. He was still expecting to be hurt.

Harry knelt before the bound man. Malfoy's prick hung resolutely downwards.

Harry squirmed his shoulders in between Malfoy's thighs and began to kiss their inner flanks, slow licks and suckles along the taut, trembling flesh, first one, then the other.

A little part of Harry that was not overcome by delicious horror at what he was doing suspected that this careful preparation was a bit like handling wild magical creatures. Everything had to be slow, gentle but decided. Despite being an utterly inexperienced lover, Harry knew not to blunder into the centre of Malfoy straight away. Not when the man was so wired with trepidation. The slightest wrong touch could be construed as threatening.

Harry continued to nuzzle and attend to those long lines of skin, tracing the muscle dips and junctions in the leg with his lips, concentrating on the bare patches where the hair had fined away. With his hands he stroked along the outside of Malfoy's thighs, coming to rest at his hips, lightly, without coercion.

Slowly Malfoy stopped flinching from Harry's tongue and the muscles relaxed slightly, allowing Harry more access. Harry darted his head forward and let his tongue graze the swelling head of Malfoy's cock. He almost backed away in alarm when the older man jolted, as if burnt.

Malfoy's breath had become ragged, and Harry suspected that in any other situation Malfoy would have been fully erect by now. The pale wizard was using all his control to keep himself from responding to Harry's touches. Harry could only do what he had done before, and that was to slowly wear Malfoy's resolve away just as water would eventually grid down stone.

He let his tongue capture the heavy glans again, testing its weight, before running the tip pointedly around the ridge, into the eye. When he felt Malfoy's thighs tense as if to push him away, Harry left Malfoy's cock alone and returned to the almost-neutral thighs and hips. He kissed and stroked these places appreciatively until Malfoy's legs opened again, and a hiss escaped him that could almost have been _please_.

Harry moved forward lapped at the underside of Malfoy's penis and took what he could of the organ into his hot mouth. Malfoy groaned and practically left the chair, hissing with effort. His wrists jagged against the sharp edges of the dragon-hide that bound him. Harry only had to suckle a few more times before Malfoy surrendered completely, becoming fully erect in Harry's mouth. A strong-tasting leak of precome followed, and Harry's own prick responded with a twitch that seemed to wrench his belly.

Malfoy's hips began to cant back and forth, but Harry could not tell whether he was trying to pull away or push in. Harry drew and sucked harder until his jaw ached from trying to accommodate the organ's width, before pulling back to just look at this wonderful part of Malfoy's body, the silky thickness, the way the cock veins moved but didn't quite give way under a vigorous stroke of his tongue. His mental camera was practically branding this sight onto the very surface of his skull. Oh gods he thought, This has ruined me.

Harry could not linger long on that thought because his hunger demanded he continue to devote himself to Malfoy, or at least that part of Malfoy that made him so obsessed. He licked, and each long stroke of his tongue would elicit a brutal, hoarse cry from Malfoy's lips, and each time Malfoy cried out it seemed as if the sound scored right through Harry, from the tip of Harry's aching cock to the top of his spine, and he would shake from exertion, battling not to give in to weakness again, to be strong by not being the one who came first, to show Malfoy he could have this control over him and not be affected by it. It was he who held the emotional ropes, and it would be his decision to cut them.

As Harry continued, speeding up, tasting and nipping Malfoy's balls, flicking the smooth underside of his tongue across the crimson glans, the sounds Malfoy made came faster, and his cries were higher in pitch with a desperate edge. Harry looked up from his exquisite task and wanted to groan appreciatively when he saw Malfoy's head thrown back, the silvergold hair outlined against the brands like a halo, the cords of his neck standing out in sharp relief.

Oh gods, he thought, Malfoy was glorious, especially when every muscle in him strained for release with such intensity that Harry could hear the leather of the bonds creak under the tension. More than once Harry's tongue slid off the glans on an upwards stroke, continuing up Malfoy's chest to a nipple, to a damp shoulder, to tongue the ribs and experience the latent magic that seemed to effervesce through Malfoy's sweat. No ordinary man would taste like this, so fresh and dark and seething with barely restrained power, that if Harry closed his eyes he could imagine his tongue sweeping across the flesh of some unknowable, insatiable creature, not a man at all.

Suddenly Harry feared that if he didn't kiss Malfoy now he would surely die, and he couldn't kiss him, for even at the height of his distraction Malfoy was as deadly and dangerous as any one of Charlie's dragons.

The impossibility of claiming the man's mouth with his own filled Harry with an unbelievable panic. He couldn't bear it, not with Malfoy so ready and so beautiful and untouchable and he realized if he tasted all of Malfoy, licked him to completion and let himself receive that heady spurt of come, if Malfoy cried out Harry's name like he had the last time, a circuit would trip in his mind and he'd be addicted.

He would lose himself to those eyes and that skin and be imprisoned by their hatred, and his lust and desire and necessity for this one individual alone. The need would drive him upon Malfoy's mercy, knew that he would gladly exchange his life just to be forced upon the flagstones of the cell and to open up for that massive cock and to have Malfoy pounding into him just as the relentless ocean pounded against the cliffs of Azkaban, and Harry would scream for more even as Malfoy killed him, and just knowing that he would give up his life out of such intense need filled him with sickness, dread and desire.

The fact that Harry had allowed himself to reach this juncture was the most terrifying thing of all.

A sudden rush of sensation flowed through Harry and he knew it for what it was, the drop before his own climax. He couldn't let Malfoy see him like this again, how Malfoy had affected him and continued to affect him. Harry fled the room, his prick so hard he could barely stand up, flinging open the door and throwing himself against the opposite wall.

He fumbled to free his burning prick from his trousers, the skin stretched so tight over the rigid core his fingers seemed as if they would split the flesh along the grain, and the next thing he saw was his seed jetting against the wall when it should have been against pale, sweat slicked skin. He climaxed with such agony was as if his insides were being torn from the root, his hand flung up against that terrible stone to steady himself against the unfairness and pain of his orgasm, against the unconscious crash of water against immovable earth, and most of all against Lucius sobbing and screaming in the next room, _"Finish it, finish it..."_

Screaming, because he could still see Harry's back shuddering against the far wall. Malfoy knew what Harry had just done and Harry wanted to cry out: I cant, I cant finish it because if he did he would be enslaved, and the worst thought was - was he already a slave? Was he too late?

He last spasm drained him. Harry slid down the wall and huddled, miserable beyond words. After several minutes he turned his head to peer back into the cell, ready for Malfoy's wrath.

Instead Malfoy was paying him no attention, hunched over as far as the chair would allow, trembling and breathing in shallow pants as if he were in pain. Malfoy was suffering the ache of coming so far but not far enough, having to wait for the blood to drain out of his unsatisfied cock and back into his body, blood poisoned with anticipation without release

Harry felt wracking sobs escaping him, as if he'd been unmanned and was just a kid again, the situation closing him like the prison walls.

"I want you Lucius, oh gods, oh Merlin you don't know how much." He heard himself say, but he wasn't in his bedroom at night, he was sitting in Azkaban with Malfoy barely ten paces away, listening intently despite the dull agony of his interrupted climax.

"Why," Harry sobbed, "why do you have to be what you are?"

Malfoy did not reply, did not even look at him, and Harry did not think he would. It was too late to turn back for either of them now. Harry had been tied on to the dragon, and had not been able to cut himself free.

Harry crawled to his feet and with agonized slowness returned to the watchtower, back to the Burrow and to Ron's confused, worried face.

_TBC - Ritual _


	3. Ritual

_(A/N: Please note that this story is for mature readers only...)_

* * *

There is a ritual he must follow now, before he goes to his lover. He leaves his showers to the last thing at night, and stands in the bathtub, prick in his frantic hand, trying to finish off before the stuttering water goes cold.

He always does.

Sometimes twice, because there are memories stirred by the bare rattling pipes and the chipped tile, they make him think of the first time, the only time he ever saw the man come, when Harry had fallen to his knees to nuzzle and lick the thick spill from the stone, the time he realized that this act had a power over him that he would never be able to withstand.

Never, if he saw the act through to completion.

Harry has to do this ritual before he ports to Azkaban. He needs to make sure sharp edges of his arousal are tempered before he sees Malfoy. He still gets hard in Malfoy's presence, and he rarely makes it out of the prison without leaving some deposit on the wall or floor, but never yet in front of _him_, never in _his_ full view. He still has that barrier up.

But for how long?

* * *

With the shower ritual finished Harry dried off slowly with a threadbare towel. He rummaged the coarse fabric over his arms, across his shoulders, his legs and back until he was practically covered in an all-over friction burn, his nerved flayed and singing. He could have used magic - there were a number of spells for the purpose of getting a body dry, but he desperately needed the rough cats-tongue of the towel to chafe over his skin, drag heat to the cooling surfaces, otherwise he would feel so insubstantial he might float away.

His stay at the Burrow had been extended to the start of term. Normally this would make his life complete. But his life was not complete, halved as it was between here and the wizard prison. Now there were eyes everywhere, and each night when Harry made the trek upstairs to Ron's room, he was required by his own necessity to make a big show of going to bed.

At first waiting for the right time to port had been easy, for Ron could rival the dead for sleeping. Harry could stay away for hours, and not come back until the sky began to turn the metallic shade of a sea-shell's innards.

As the days wore into weeks, Ron began to notice the changes in Harry, catching him napping during the day, or seeing the way Harry's attention wandered frequently to parts unknown. Ron had started to delay his bedtime, sometimes keeping the lumos brighter than it needed to be and staying up longer. Like most red-heads Ron could be quick and crafty. He did not miss Harry's discomfort as the hours wore on and the self-turning hourglass would tip over and over.

Tonight, on reaching Ron's room Harry's saw that his friend had already curled into the bedclothes. The simple enchanted brazier-flame that was the nightlight - Ron never liked the dark when he was on his own, and kept it on even with Harry there because it was his habit - cast the room into familiar flickering yellow. This was the same magic of the Azkaban brands, this queer, atonal gloom.

The images that had tumbled through him during his ten minutes in the shower returned with a harsh, hot clarity. The bound man. The silver-gold hair. A nipple hardened and peaked from the action of his frantic, hungry tongue, skin gleaming with his own saliva, a throat that he could only stare at for his lover permitted no such contact, the straight lines of the collarbone, the indents of the shoulder, his face and startling silver-grey eyes.

Without checking to see how asleep Ron was, Harry held the knife to his lips, pressing hard against the glassy surface. He knew that if the portkey did not work now he would slice his own skin from the frustration. Like one would whisper to an idol he whispered.

"Azkaban."

* * *

"Where did you go?"

Ron was awake, and looked like as if he had been for a while. When Harry returned to the room, the cold tang of apparition still aching in his sinuses, Ron was perched on the end of his bed. With his frown and knobby knees drawn up to his chest, Ron reminded Harry of the gargoyles that perch on cathedral corners, surveying the sins of an old city. Ron's thin face seemed to reduce in the brazier-light to shelves and platforms of shadow and stone.

"Harry?" repeated Ron, when Harry couldn't answer. He had not expected Ron to be up waiting for him. "Where were you?"

Harry folded up his glasses and slid them onto the crooked chest of drawers that separated his temporary fold-a-bed from Ron's hand-me-down four-poster. Easier to lie to a blur.

"Nowhere."

Even the players in the Quidditch posters stopped their endless broomstick cavorting and stared suspiciously at Harry.

"I can see that. And with Charlie's portkey knife too."

The strap-knife was still gleaming in Harry's hand. He wedged it under the pillow. "That's nothing either."

"You've got crud on your trousers," said Ron peevishly, knowing exactly what it was that Harry had spilt onto his pants.

Cheeks burning, Harry looked down and saw that there were indeed two distinct smears of just-dried white mucus laced along the inside of his thighs. His knees were damp and slimy from where he had knelt to...

Harry had to close your eyes and think of something, anything else. As soon as the memory of the last hour slid into his mind he could feel the muscles of his pelvis tightening, blood pooling in his groin, that suffocating heat rising through his chest, had to think of something that wasn't pale hair, fire-tinged skin, long legs - dark - thick - sweat - magic - hardness - swelling...

Harry turned away, shucking his cloak and his offending garments. They landed close to his trunk in an untidy heap.

"Look, Ron, I'm tried. I don't want to talk about it."

Ron sniffed. "What's that smell?"

"What smell?"

Ron's nose twitched. "Damp. Dark...magic." Ron's eyes squinted. _Sex_. Harry felt an invasive _wormy_ feeling, as if something was tapping blindly just behind his eyes. Six years with magic folk and still there were idiosyncrasies to make Harry uneasy. He nudged Ron's shoulder with a knuckle.

"Stop it Weasley."

Tried to keep his voice light. But like one offensively Purist saying said, you couldn't truly lie to someone of the blood.

"You've been on the make, and you've not me about it?" Ron sounded hurt. "Why would you hide seeing some girl? I was all right with Cho, and when you were trying to get a date the year before last, I was there for you."

Harry grimaced. How could Ron understand? Ron, who could barely comprehend heterosexual relationships, and who still had trouble with Ginny's boyfriends.

It's not fair you sneaking out on adventures, I mean, maybe she has a friend..."

"NO." Harry said so sharply he almost frightened himself. "It's not a girl, and they don't have friends you'd be wanting to associate with."

Ron's eyes widened at the full realisation of what Harry was saying hit him. "Not a girl...? Harry, you never told me you were..."

Defeated, Harry sat on the end of the bed and felt a great tide of weariness wash over him. "I never knew. I mean, I've guessed I liked...you know, boys instead of girls for a long time now, but I didn't think it meant anything."

Ron squinted at Harry, thoughtful and a little wary.

"You're not sweet on _me_ are you...?"

When Harry glanced daggers at him Ron raised his hands apologetically. "Look, sorry mate, I had to ask." He shrugged and settled back onto the bed. "But surely you can't at least bring him round for supper or something, I don't think Mum would mind."

Harry looked at Ron blankly, then to his surprise laughed. Ron's idea of normality only served to illustrate just how perverse his relationship was.

He laughed, but it was either that or cry.

* * *

Harry decided against using the knife for a few days, for he knew that Ron was making a point of staying up to catch him out.

This turned out to be a bad decision.

The withdrawal came late in the next day, whilst helping Ron and Charlie clean up after supper. Charlie had been in the process of enchanting the cutlery clean, and being rough with the wand, had knurled all the pieces into small lumps and curlicues of sliver. Not only that, but the pieces in the drawers had kinked out of sheer sympathy.

Molly Weasley had been livid. Harry decided to help Charlie through the laborious process of straightening each knife, fork and spoon while the remaining Weasleys went to see a theatre show at the Alley.

Harry had wanted to see the show himself, a comedy about three witches and a king, but a part of him had noticed that Charlie's behaviour had been altered since the day Harry had kissed him in the kitchen.

In a way, Charlie's magical mistakes were due in no small part to Harry's presence. Heavy with responsibility, he stayed to help Charlie restore the pieces to their original shape.

They worked quietly and steadily, smoothing each piece with a combination of wand-work and luck before laying them flat on waxed paper.

"It's lucky that the cutlery is silver, and not silver plate," said Charlie after a conversation about Quiddich pre-selection died down. "Pure iron or steel is remarkably resistant to magic. It's what we use to chain the dragons." He paused, then added, "That's why all the bars on Azkaban hold their charges so well."

Harry's wand slipped, and a butter-knife edge curled up at the sides like a rotted leaf.

Charlie saw the slip, and was silent.

"You don't want the portkey back, do you?" asked Harry, suddenly.

"Consider it a gift."

Harry slipped his hand over Charlie's arm. "Thank you."

Charlie was again quiet. He lay his hand over Harry's.

"Harry, sometimes I think of you as a kid, and I shouldn't because you're sixteen, you're of age. I think also that I might have been too hasty when I pushed you away. After you kissed me..."

Even under his tanned face, Charlie was blushing.

"You weren't too hasty. You knew I had things to deal with."

"Have you dealt with them?"

Harry did not even blink. "Yes."

"That's good to hear." The hand was not removed.

"I...I have to go to the Dursley's. There's something I have to pick up." said Harry.

"Will you be back soon?"

"I will."

Harry had barely stepped out the door before he'd used the strap-knife.

* * *

By the time the Warden had winkingly led Harry down into the dungeon, Harry was already feeling the loss of his preparation ritual. His erection was making each step pure agony. Control was not something that he had an option on. If Charlie had not touched him, and filled him with dragon-stink and reminded him so powerfully of Lucius Malfoy he might have borne one more night and been rid of the man.

Then again, he might have not.

The Warden let Harry know how Lucius had been prepared. He was now being allowed, as was his designation as Harry's toy, to wash daily and to live in what could charitably called human conditions.

Harry stepped into Malfoy's new surroundings. He did not move far from the door, unsure of the length of the ankle chain keeping Malfoy fettered.

On Harry's entrance Malfoy slowly put down the quill on the writing desk, rolled up the parchment, and stood up.

Harry felt his stomach clench and his balls tighten from visceral lust when he saw Malfoy, not naked, not tied, but dressed in what was obviously the most agreeably simple of his own clothes. The black shirt and breeches contrasted against his creamy-gold skin, his hair was tied back and he stood in a lazy, provocative way, like a Knockturn harlot, supremely confident of their sexual influence upon the unwary watcher.

Harry remembered that he had some time ago asked the Warden to make sure Malfoy was not marked or damaged any further. Harry had discovered he was a jealous lover, and had already begun to covet every little patch of Malfoy's skin. He found any bruise or blemish as offensive as the mark of some other's ownership, and had taken it upon himself to complain bitterly if he found anything amiss.

The Warden had clearly kept his part of the bargain. Malfoy, keenly aware of his position, seemed to have wheedled yet more privileges out of the prison. Hence the writing desk, his own clothes, and the real bed.

If Malfoy was startled by Harry's arrival, he did not show it.

"What do you want, boy?" he asked with sublime boredom.

Harry paid no heed to the Warden at his back. He stepped forward, as close as he dared. He too tried to stand at his full height and present an authoritative air, although it was killing him to have Malfoy so close and so beautiful without immediately touching him.

"I want you to fuck me." Harry said, his voice hoarse with excitement. "I want you inside me. I want you to do what you've been threatening to do."

Malfoy's eyes narrowed until they were slits of fury.

"You want _me_, to approach _you_ under _my_ own influence? You are mistaken boy, for _I will not_."

"You will," said Harry. Already his hand was sliding up under his pullover and to the buttons of his shirt, so turned on now he knew that if Malfoy's delicious cock were to slide anywhere near him he would lose his seed in one eruption of release.

"It'll take an unforgivable to make me do that boy, and they are..." he flicked his silver eyes towards the grinning Warden "Forbidden, here."

"I will not make it that easy for you."

"Oh?"

"Warden, I want him tied," Harry had to swallow, his whole lower body, from chest to knee was throbbing at a frantic call of his arousal and the rest of his body was working doubly hard to catch up. "On the chair."

The Warden let out a small cough. "May I suggest the bed - face down?" he said, trying to be urbane and sophisticated and only managing to sound depraved.

Harry turned his attention to the Warden and did not release it until the Warden murmured, "The chair, sir, of course."

Out of some form of provocation the same contraption used in the stone room was also kept in Malfoy's new cell, an object left to remind Malfoy of the conditions of his privilege. He was the plaything of a person of some importance.

Two hooded guards appeared then, their wands thick and blunt.

As the clothes were stripped from him, Malfoy's slitted eyes remained fixed on Harry. The seething anger that radiated from Malfoy was somehow keener tonight, as if Harry had broken the rules of another ritual. He was too early, he was watching Malfoy be manhandled, he was in Malfoy's own cell rather than on the neutral territory of the round room.

With some force the blond man was positioned on the restraining chair. Harry glared at the hooded guards in turn, not wanting them touching his lover, wanting them gone. As one bent for the waistband of Malfoy's strides Harry barked, "Stop!"

The guard paused, then moved away.

"Go now," said Harry, trying to remain polite. They saw Malfoy unclothed all the time, it was just...

It was that he couldn't bear seeing anyone near Malfoy now. Initially he had only been disturbed and worried by the others involved in Malfoy's incarceration and punishment. Tonight the emotion that cut into him was razor-sharp. Jealousy, that old monster, was clawing through his brain.

Harry did not move until the guards were gone, and the simpering, smiling Warden had backed out of the cell.

"Did he upset you, my hooded attendant?" drawled Malfoy. "Perhaps it would upset you more to know that each night he gladly finishes the job that you leave undone..."

The monster bit, hard. Harry crossed the room in no more than three strides and slapped Malfoy across the face.

"You _whore,_" screamed Harry. "You _do not_ touch anyone unless I allow it!"

A bright red imprint of Harry's hand sprung up across Malfoy's cheek, and the pale wizard's eyes were alight in triumph.

"You cannot stay here all the time boy. You cannot control what I do while you are gone." Malfoy hissed gleefully, tilting his chin, daring Harry to strike him again. "You will have to console yourself that it is another man's prick I take into my mouth and never yours."

Harry had to clench his fists and bolt his arms by his sides, lest he would have struck Malfoy again. The rage and resentment he felt was like a giant hand crushing his lungs and driving a hot brand into his eye-sockets. He bent forward and tore open the waistband and fly of Malfoy's strides, yanking the torn fabric below Malfoy's knees and fixing his mouth over Malfoy's half-erect organ with barely restrained violence.

He suckled hard, not considering his teeth or the gentleness he needed to take with this part of his lover. Perversely the pain stimulated Malfoy even more, and the bound man groaned loudly, his frantic hips matching the brutal rhythm of Harry's mouth. Harry curled his fingers into Malfoy's buttocks, digging into the muscle remorselessly.

Malfoy could not control the sounds he made, each exhalation of breath coming from him in strangled burrs, rising in pitch as he passed the point of no return. For what must have been an agonizing second Malfoy must have thought Harry was going to finish, push him over the peak...

Harry pulled back with a gasp. He had never dragged Malfoy this far before. He had practically felt the pressure build up behind the man's groin, making the organ almost impossibly hard.

The look of absolute mad loathing Malfoy gave Harry would have burnt him to a crisp had there been no wards against magic in Azkaban.

Harry pulled off his knitted pullover and the shirt beneath it, feeling the cool air of the cell on his sweat-clammy skin.

"I will take you all the way, but you know what you have to give me." said Harry.

"No." grated Malfoy. He sounded like a man at his upper limit of endurance. "I will not."

Harry pulled off his own strides. His hard-on stood straight out, yearning for soft lips, a hot mouth. A part of him sensed that this was the first time Malfoy had seen him naked. It pleased him no end that a look of desire and confusion roiled over Malfoy's face as he stared at Harry's lean, young body and blatant erection. Malfoy's tongue ran over his lips and Harry jerked involuntarily, as he had such an impression of that very tongue slurping over his prick it felt almost real.

"Stay away from me boy," said Malfoy, but there was no conviction to his voice. His member had not lost its rigidity. It strained towards Harry's nakedness as if it had a life of its own and Malfoy had merely been grafted on as an afterthought.

Harry straddled Malfoy's thighs. His prick grazed Malfoy's stomach, leaving a shiny ribbon of precome, and Harry had to suck in his breath and bite down on his lip. Any more of this and he would come too soon. Malfoy twisted in his restraints, and Harry didn't know whether he was encouraging Harry or trying to pull away.

Harry had a suspicion that Malfoy didn't know either.

Angling the thick head between his arse cheeks, Harry began to bear down on Malfoy's large cock...

...and found that he could not.

He bit his lip and fitfully tried to force the virgin ring over the saliva slicked organ. He pushed, felt the muscle clench and not give. He pushed harder, until it truly hurt. Malfoy breathed in sharply, tilted his head, and with blank eyes took on the same apprehensive look he'd done on the night Harry had first tongued him to near-climax. Harry knew Malfoy's reactions intimately enough to sense that this effort was intensely uncomfortable.

He couldn't force the orifice open. Malfoy might have been hard, but he was not unbreakable. Bearing all Harry's weight like this could theoretically do him damage. Harry's disappointment was tremendous. He had expected his ring to open up by some kind of unknown sexual response, and yet it was remaining resolutely shut.

"If you would help me..." grunted Harry, nuzzling his ring over the head of Malfoy's cock. "I don't want this to hurt you."

Malfoy did not reply, but his jaw hardened in defiance, against Harry, against his own traitorous, flesh-hungry body. This act, no matter how successfully it panned out for Harry, was still going to end in Malfoy being left erect and unfulfilled. Malfoy knew too well Harry's sexual conditions. Arouse to insensibility, then leave Malfoy hard, sweating and disgruntled, the transaction incomplete.

Harry climbed off Malfoy's lap. The places where his thighs had pressed up close to Malfoy's own were cold, and yet inside he burned. Harry had tried and failed.

"Are we done?" asked Malfoy. "I will have my guard attendant back. He is not so clumsy as you."

Malfoy's face had frozen into a sneer, one side already darkening from the hand-print bruise. Harry wanted to slap the other side of that beautiful face, shove his thumbs into that mouth and force the jaw open, plunge his prick inside the forbidden cavity...

...by the same token he wanted to fall at Malfoy's feet, beg forgiveness for all these times of withholding pleasure and then show him what he could give, with his hands and tongue and kisses, be with him always, days and nights of climax and release and yes, love.

Harry stood before Lucius, naked and wounded by his internal monster, and yet he spoke with an aching pride.

"You might have this man, you might have a hundred, but I _love you,_ need you and covet everything about you more than they ever will. That's all that matters and that's all I have to say."

He collected his clothes and left the cell.

* * *

The room was dark, and for that Harry was grateful. He touched the foot that dangled out from under the tatty patchwork duvet, feeling the coarse hair at the ankle, hair that from memory was ginger, for everything about Charlie was hairy and coarse and bestial.

Ever since his obsession with Malfoy, Harry had watched Charlie with this new deliberation, at the dining table, in the garden, on the brooms, from a few steps behind whilst shopping in the Alley. He had seen Charlie's hair curling out from everywhere, from the spiky head, the sleek fur of his arms, the wild pelt that sprung at his throat.

Charlie Weasley was everything that Malfoy was not, and yet in their differences they converged.

Now, as Harry's hand slipped under the bedclothes and sought higher up the stocky leg, he knew there was also gratuitous amounts of crinkly pubic hair where his penis nestled.

Charlie stirred, murmured something trivial in Romanian, gave a handler's command in African click-language, still deep in the tail-end of a dream about dragons. He was much like Ron in his restlessness, as if the suppurating magic of pure-bloods kept him half-awake always.

Charlie did not wake as Harry began to stroke him, only murmured like a lover to an unseen object of his memory, whispering, cajoling a monster to repose. As Harry manipulated Charlie's organ he felt a twinge of envy towards the man, that his passions could flow into things non-human.

Harry's passions were human, and so intensely linked to one man, everything else was unfair.

He touched and fondled, and could not drag from his mind how the organ felt wrong in his hand. Not as large as Malfoy's, not as hot or as urgent. But Harry doubled any man living would feel so perfect as Malfoy did under his palm.

Slowly Charlie roused from his sleep, and in the dim light his broad features settled into a contented smile.

"Harry," murmured Charlie, not stopping Harry's hand from stroking his now fully erect penis.

"Charlie."

Charlie tipped his hands under his head and let Harry continue his ministrations.

"How was it at the Dursleys? You were away for a while."

"Mmm," said Harry, before climbing under the covers with Charlie and kissing him, roughly, the same hunger that he'd impressed upon Charlie weeks before, his hand still on Charlie's cock, rough and impatient.

"What do you want then?" asked Charlie in a teasing tone, still a big brother in his heart, though he lay naked and erect next to his youngest brother's best friend.

Another one of those hurried kisses found Charlie's mouth. Wet, with too much tongue. Charlie frowned, slightly, smacking his lips, as if tasting something on Harry that he did not expect from a young, innocent man.

Harry rubbed his hairless chest against Charlie, and Charlie forgot what had disturbed him.

"I want you to open me, I want you to show me..." grated Harry, snatching at one of Charlie's hands and placing it on his arse.

"Yes," moaned Charlie. "Oh Harry, yes."

As Charlie's mouth skidded down him in the gloom, Harry imagined another mouth on his skin. Another head, gleaming silver-blond and ghostly, longer, lankier limbs. Harry turned over onto his stomach and closed his eyes, the vision continuing. Malfoy's teeth were nipping his sacrum, his lips were sliding between Harry's buttocks, his hot muscular tongue was probing Harry's ring with such a combination of gentleness and intensity Harry had to restrain himself from pushing his hips into the man's face.

Lubricated thumbs and fingers pushed their way into his opening, stretching and preparing him, and Harry's mind cooled into logic, storing the information for further use.

Finally a lubricated cock slipped past the once previously impenetrable barrier, making Harry gasp in alarm. He had not quite expected this feeling of fullness, nor had he expected he hit of pleasure as the head stroked over a sensitive spot deep inside him.

The grunting, panting breath behind his ear could have belonged to anyone, but for Harry it belonged to one person and one person only.

The thrusting built up in intensity, and the initial pain gave way to a bittersweet gratification. As the pleasure built, Harry felt his mouth curl around the syllables of that name, just as his hand curled about his own prick, just as he thought of cold stone and hot skin. His climax smashed through him like a body-blow ...

"Harder Lucius, harder!" Harry screamed. "Lucius, Lucius!"

Charlie's erection melted away as if he had plunged his prick into ice water. He pulled out of Harry and collapsed next to him.

"Shit." said Charlie, flinging his hand over his eyes against the muted lumos.

Harry realized what he had done. It had not been Charlie's name he had cried out. His come was damp on the sheets.

"I'm sorry."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

But there was no real anger in Charlie's voice. He'd known all along.

Harry rolled away and sat up in the bed. His eyes burned. When he took a breath it caught in his throat, and the exhale was a sob.

Charlie reached out a hand to touch Harry's back. Harry shook him off.

"Please don't touch me."

"What's wrong, Harry? Why are you crying? I didn't hurt you...did I?"

Harry was silent for a long time. He sniffed, and murmured, "That was my first time."

"Oh."

"I wanted it to be him."

Harry could barely feel Charlie stir on the bed. He knew that his words had wounded. Charlie might have been impulsive, but he would not have accepted Harry so willingly into the bed without the feeling being reciprocated.

"I thought you'd gotten over fucking Malfoy. That was why I gave you the portkey. That you'd face up to him and finish it."

Harry didn't reply. His skin was cooling now, and he could smell Charlie on him, that curious mix of earthy Weasley and the rank odour of dragon. He wanted to shower and return to his own bed, even if it meant facing Ron's accusing glare.

"Harry? Why are you still going to see him? I have a right to know."

Harry spun on him. "What _right_? Just because you fuck me..."

"Excuse me Mister Potter, it was you coming on to me, hungry for someone who wasn't a child, using my knife to pop off to Azkaban every other night. It was because of you I've extended my stay here!"

"Okay!" yelled Harry, "I'll stop,_ I'll fucking stop_!"

He yelled, not caring who heard him. He heard Molly run to Charlie's door, then wait, not speaking, before going away without knocking or asking what was wrong.

The whole house knew now.

"Do you promise?" whispered Charlie.

"I do," said Harry desperately. "I'll stop. I'll end it."

But he could not.

* * *


	4. Torment

/8/8/8

Torment.

Suffering.

Pain.

Jealousy.

And love too, but that particular emotion didn't have the same immediacy as the others did. At sixteen years old Harry could no more articulate love than then he could separate the associated symptoms of lust and yearning. Love was what he felt for Ron and Hermoine and for Ron's family in a warm kind of way, but the word also encompassed what he felt for the man who was the cause of his Torment.

That man. Harry trembled at the thought of him. Felt love - that word again - and hatred and all the permutations in between. He knew now what it was to be hurt without touch, to be torn and sear together a hundred times a night, to have his joints burn from days and days of tension and repressed need. He would think of hateful words that cut into his heart with more force than a magic quill into the back of his hand: 8each night he gladly finishes the job that you leave undone8.

And each night Harry burnt alive with the knowledge that 8another8 was touching 8his8 Lucius, 8another8 was running his hands in silver-gold hair while their cock was being throated and licked gleefully, 8another8 was sated by long, wet kisses while Harry was not.

Even the death of his godfather hadn't quite affected him so. Death was blunt and final. This...this had no end. It was the note in his head that squealed endlessly and of-pitch, it was the torsion of his stomach whenever he saw a pale head in the crush and push of Diagon Alley.

One of these heads caught his eye as he walked through the rough, cobble-stoned streets with Charlie, the meaty ham of Charlie's furred forearm slung heavily over Harry's shoulders.

As the crowd parted Harry saw that silver-gold flash again, and his balls responded along with his stomach. A man in his mid-twenties leant on the balustrade of a dark, crooked terrace house, long limbs draped indolently across the iron lace. A brass plaque announced the name of the residence: Silencio. A set of sigils over the lintel suggested the true business inside, and this man's purpose.

Harry's head turned as he passed the bawdy-house, his attention captured now.

The blond man was old for a boy-whore, but sometimes beauty lasted through to adulthood. The hair was a fraction too short, and did not have that cold sleekness of 8him8, but there were the familiar silver-gold highlights, a regal arrogance, a permanent sneer, as if he found all men odious.

Harry stared at the rent-boy with open longing.

The whore registered Harry's hungry glance with a lazy wink and a surreptitious lip-lick, adjusting his hips so that the bulge could clearly be seen against the black silk of his trousers. Harry might have been partnered and unavailable, but that did not rule out a later liaison.

Charlie glared at Harry and the object of Harry's attention before pulling Harry in closer under his arm. He too had noticed what it was in the whore's appearance that had so attracted his young lover.

"People like us don't waste our time on filth like him," growled Charlie in warning.

The raw sweaty stench of the dragon handler seemed to coat Harry's cheek like some repulsive unction, marking him as being owned, untouchable. On one hand Harry hated to think such bad thoughts about Charlie, who was almost his brother-by-proxy, and as dear to him as Ron and Ginny. On the other, Charlie had recently become over-possessive to the extreme. Since Harry had come to Charlie's bed, Charlie had not left him alone for a minute. Even on floo-ing to Diagon Alley, ostensibly to shop for school supplies, Charlie had demanded that he come along.

"You shouldn't be walking around the alley on your own. Especially with You-Know-Who lurking about," he had said officiously.

"He's always been lurking about," Harry had replied. "Always."

But Harry didn't have the energy to complain further. At the very worst, Charlie could just ask for the portkey knife back. So he had submitted to Charlie's escort, and Charlie's whispered words, "8I've booked a room at the Cauldron for us to stay8."

The trip turned out not to be as agonizing as Harry feared. Somehow the hot, crowded streets of the Alley, the myriad stores with their diamond-cut leadlight windows, and swallow's nests under the eaves, their crooked leaning terraces, their wares and paraphernalia, their esotericia and ephemera all acted upon and soothed Harry's aching mind. It was hard to ponder and fret over a single subject when so much was going on about him, when organ-grinders and street peddlers patrolled the streets, when children's theatres with battered Punch and Judy puppets ran sexual, violent performances. Raggedy men on stilts, sly crooked wizards in Beefeaters regalia, Harlequins and Columbines, poor Fools and wizened witches passed him in the throng and he was happy, at least for an afternoon, to forget everything and disappear into the carnival atmosphere of this magical street.

With all Harry's books bought, as well as some new robes, and some complicated bit of alchymical apparatus consisting of tiny mirrors, levers and lenses, the pair returned to the Leaky Cauldron, their lodgings for the night.

In the rapidly setting sun Harry looked for the blond whore in the crooked house again, but like all beautiful goods it seemed that buyer had not been long in the coming. Another boy no older than Harry was parked outside the front of the house. As a testament to the quality of non-Knockturn courtesans, this boy was also uncommonly attractive, with chocolate skin and hair twisted into a serpent's nest of tiny dreadlocks.

Attractive, yes, but the boy didn't produce in Harry the immediate lurch that the fair one had.

Once in the wood-smoke scented interior of the old pub, Charlie pushed Harry upstairs, his callused hand on Harry's hip, thumb insinuated into Harry's waistband. Harry could not help but feel under sufferance. Charlie wanted Harry, but Harry's sexual predilections had since fined down into an exacting type. A type that the whore had so closely matched.

Once on the rough-hewn balustrade of the Leaky Cauldron, Harry cast one longing look at the crowd on the pub's lower floor. He so envied the boisterous press of social drinkers, and the couples secreted into the dim corners, hands dipping and caressing under robes. He saw here and there the flash of a pointed boot, a frilled garter, purple stocking. How was it that these people led uncomplicated lives while his seemed to tessellate into puzzle-pieces finer and finer still?

He nudged open the door, expecting Charlie to take him immediately, as had been his pattern these last few weeks.

Charlie did not.

Neither it would seem, would the tall, powerful dark-skinned man who sat in a chair in the far corner of the room, lumos-light reflecting off his gleaming head.

"Kingsley!" gasped Harry. "What are you doing here?"

"Hello Harry," said another voice, and he wheeled to see that Tonks was also in the room, propped up on the crooked dresser as if she were a very large purple-headed ornament.

Charlie closed the door behind him and leant up against it, arms folded, a severe expression across his face.

"What is this?" demanded Harry.

"An intervention," said Kingsley. "It's what we sometimes use to help those with--" His eyes shifted slightly, "Addictions."

"Look, I don't know what you're talking about," Harry turned back towards the door. Charlie pushed his back against it, and his expression became even more fierce.

"Harry, you 8will8 stay here and listen," said Kingsley, rising to his full, impressive height. He could easily touch the exposed beams of the establishment's ceiling with his elbows if he wanted to.

Harry glared at Kingsley, but made no more effort to walk out.

"Take off your shirt and jumper," said Charlie. "Show them."

"WHAT?!"

"Please Harry," said Tonks, clearly embarrassed at the situation, but at least having the good graces to show it. "Just do what they say and get it over with."

Harry did not know who to direct his anger at - Charlie for his betrayal, or to Tonks and Kingsley for just being there. Resolute and indignant, he pulled off the cable-knitted pullover Molly Weasley had knitted as a Christmas present for him years ago. It still fitted him, the magical fibres lengthening as his body became long and lanky with adolescence and adulthood.

He pulled the shirt off, and stood bare-chested in front of the three wizards. He made sure that no reaction played upon his face as he heard Tonks' gasp segue with Kingsley's wordless murmur.

"Where did you get those bites?" asked Kingsley, trying and failing not to sound alarmed.

Harry's hand raised to the palest and oldest, an ellipse of teeth marks over his nipple. They were marks he could he healed with a touch but had left, left for his lover as testament to his devotion, and to himself, as a reminder of his torment.

Where had he gotten this bite?

Yes, where indeed.

/8/8/8

Harry had came to Malfoy's cell, this time with a gift of wine. A blood-dark poisonberry merlot, heady and rich, one of nature's true aphrodisiacs. Though Malfoy had sneered at the late vintage, he had downed the offered glass to its last drop. His sliver-grey eyes lost some of their intensity as he relaxed, the wine taking effect. Then, pink-cheeked from the first taste of alcohol in a long while, he submitted to the chair without complaint.

Harry shooed the guards out before they could even start on Malfoy's clothes.

Harry did not approach straight away. He had last left Malfoy in anger, unable to force himself upon the pale wizard, burning with jealousy. Malfoy knew Harry's weakness. Him.

They regarded each other like a pair of duellers from either end of the cell.

"Come on then boy," said Malfoy. "Do what you need to do and then be done with this. You know that it is what happens after you leave that I truly look forward to."

Harry did not move for a long time. The anger that washed over him was so pure that Harry knew if he 8did8 move, it would only be to strike out and hurt and scream.

So he stood rooted to the spot for several minutes until slowly, out of their own volition, his hands reached up to his neck and began loosening his red and gold school tie.

An unreadable expression seemed to pass before Malfoy's high, patrician features before he said with more force, "He has such a sweet organ, my prison guard lover, and willingly he gives it to me. You yourself would die a thousand deaths to experience the pleasure I give to him, the release that you will never have."

Harry had by then shucked his robe, blazer and shirt. "I die a thousand deaths with you anyway."

Malfoy stopped speaking and his breath stopped for a long, slow second. Harry knew what he saw. His young chest was golden in the firelight, lean and strong. Harry existed in that fey, transitory period between the child and the adult, a magical, sacred time of life, as fleeting as a sigh. Malfoy, pre-blood and with generations over-sensitised to the magical, could not speak for his admiration of what he saw, despite that body being attached to his enemy.

"You...you 8disgust8 me," said Malfoy hoarsely, the outline of his erection thick and obvious along the left leg of his strides, right down to the outline of his shaft and glans.

Harry swept his fingers over his nipples, and almost shuddered with delight at seeing Malfoy's eyes follow the languid movements of his hands, his mouth open, his breath ragged. Malfoy's tongue darted between his dry lips. "You..." he started, "You..."

He could not finish.

Harry was now sliding out his belt, and letting his strides fall to his waist, so that the snail-trail of pubic hair, so recently dark and obvious, was leading Malfoy's distracted glance down Harry's belly to the preliminary tuft of pubic hair.

The power that Harry was so obviously having over Malfoy made Harry's own erection ache with poignant gratification.

"Lucius. Would you like to taste me, here?" asked Harry. His fingers still whispered over his nipple.

The unlikely question seemed to startle Malfoy into silence. Lucius' whole body was screaming, from his erection to the hunger in his face to the tension in his body, yet the man was stoic as a person of his station could be.

Harry approached and leant forward, over Malfoy's knees, which instinctively parted to allow Harry to move closer, and with absolute authority brought his chest towards Malfoy's sex-flushed mouth. The older man made a sound in his throat close to a lions sough, feral, rutting. Harry let out a grunt as a broad tongue rasped over his sensitive nipple, then moaned in a higher pitch as the tongue sharpened into a point and ravaged the little nub of flesh with a violence that only hinted at the sheer sexual brutality this man could inflict upon him.

Harry's cock could not be contained, and in some far away place, miles and lifetimes from the vortex of sensation at his nipple Harry pushed down his strides to allow his prick to spring free. He brought his hands up to Malfoy's head, ready to move that blistering, bestial mouth to his desperate organ.

Without warning Malfoy suddenly bit down on the pectoral muscle, seizing the skin and skin on one savage mouthful. Harry let out a scream that seemed to have been dragged out from the bottom of his stomach, a spasm punched through his abdomen from lower-back to groin, and a hot spray of spunk painted Malfoy's black-silk shirt. His tremors shook Malfoy's mouth from him.

"I warned you boy!" shouted Malfoy, his teeth red with Harry's blood. "I will not have you!"

"You might not," retorted Harry, knowing that his hard-on was returning with a vengeance. "But I will."

The blood still streaming from Harry's left nipple, Harry tore open Malfoy's shirt, casting real black-pearl buttons to the far corners of the cell. He pulled open the waistband of Malfoy's strides and released Malfoy's cock from its prison of lamb-leather. Malfoy could not suppress a moan as the straining member thrust upwards. Instinctively he angled himself closer to Harry's lips, hating the boy, but wanting his mouth.

Harry bit his lips together as he tried to avert his attention to the task at hand. He would not allow himself to lick that moist, swollen glans, despite the absolute visceral pleasure he gained from the taste of musk and pre-come, the oral fixation of that flaring penis slipping between his lips, the sense that when Malfoy was in his mouth Harry 8owned8 him.

In those sobbing, agonising seconds before Malfoy's thwarted climax, the knowledge that Malfoy would at that moment do 8anything8 for Harry if it meant release, 8anything8, be it enslavement or love or denial of Voldemort, anything if his scorching seed could be taken by Harry's mouth...that was Harry's greatest triumph.

Of course Harry never did give him that release, and Malfoy's loathing was always absolute afterwards. The rage grew with each day until it almost existed as its own entity, a hulking creature that stared down the both of them.

But now there would be another act to reckon with.

Harry retrieved the dragon-fat lubricant that he had liberated from Charlie's room, and spread the stinking unguent over Malfoy's cock until the organ gleamed and rippled hideously from its nest of dark blonde pubic hair.

The older man hissed.

"What are you doing?"

"I am taking you," replied Harry, his pretty cock again fully erect, and poking out in front of him. He could see Malfoy look at it again thoughtfully, as if regretting that he had been so quick to bite Harry in the first time.

Harry dropped his strides and with reverent care straddled Malfoy, again feeling the thick, sticky head of Malfoy's prick sliding between his arse-cheeks.He breathed in deeply. He was not fully dilated, but constant sex with Charlie had loosened him enough so he could do this.

Harry lowered himself slowly onto Malfoy's cock, his stomach fluttering from the perfect size of him, how it seemed he was filled as he needed to be filled, his secret places stroked by Malfoy's unique shape, his ring distended to exquisite pleasure-pain.

Malfoy let out a throaty cry, despair and defeat and fury mingled together. He clenched his teeth and tossed his head back, fighting for control amidst the overwhelming rush of feeling that came from burying himself into Harry's tight, burning body. Harry suckled Malfoy's neck, from the hollow in his throat to his aristocratic jaw. Malfoy was so subjugated by this tight, complete pressure he submitted to Harry's mouth with whimpering pleas to "Move, move.".

As Harry slid Malfoy's jaw and chin into his mouth, a mere breath from a kiss, the wizard came to his senses. "Get...off me..." Malfoy stopped speaking as another whimper escaped him. Harry had begun to move, sliding his hot, tight ring along every inch of Malfoy's penis. On each third or fourth stroke he would rise off completely, letting Malfoy's eyes darken with alarm, before sinking back down onto the long, hard shaft, and sighing along with Malfoy's moan of relief.

Harry's chest wound bled and stung from the sweat pouring off his body, and of all that he felt, that particular sensation was the best...

/8/8/8

Only Kingsley translated the flush of memory that radiated from the young wizard as to what it was, and he almost recoiled at the absolute carnality of the recollection.

Harry knew what made Kingsley so repulsed. Boys of Harry's age weren't supposed to know this kind of feeling. They were supposed only to know of Quiddich matches and exams and butter-beer in the pub. Kingsley would now not help himself by thinking furtively of his current lover in Harry's presence, the beautiful witch almost as tall as him, with skin as fine as copper and hair the colour of ebony.

Charlie was pushing Harry forward with rough hands, wanting Kingsley and Tonks to see what 8he8 suffered though, each time he undressed Harry and found another mark on him.

There was a clear outline of teeth on his jaw, another bite on his left shoulder, and a particularly nasty one on the inside of his right forearm.

Kingsley looked at those bites and again at Harry. The words hung between them.

8How deep have you gone, to go this far?8

/8/8/8

Trying to pull Malfoy into a position so as to have sex with him still proved a challenge, even after the first successful attempt. Getting him erect was one thing, for Malfoy's traitorous member responded eagerly to the tongue, and Harry's naked body was clearly an object of terrible distraction to the bound man, but trying to slide down onto Malfoy's prick was another.

The Warden was right. Malfoy was not tractable. He fought.

Sometimes overtly. Sometimes cunningly.

The shoulder wound had been an early casualty. After an extended orgasm in the face-away position, Harry had made the mistake of collapsing 8backwards8 into Malfoy's chest. Malfoy had not missed the opportunity to hurt Harry the only way he was able. The teeth had sunk into the ridge of muscle behind his shoulder. Harry had yelled and come and sealed yet another pattern in his sexual tapestry, the way a well-timed application of pain can sometimes extend orgasm.

Once, as Harry was slowly sliding himself up and down his lover's prodigious length Malfoy's eyes rolled back, the pupils coma-wide, he gave a few jerks and hissed a forced breath through his clenched teeth. Harry had become so intimately aquatinted with Malfoy's body he could tell how close he was, the minute changes in his sweat, the tiny movements of his muscles. This was a reaction he had not expected.

Then with wonder Harry realized that this tiny shock was an actual example of a multiple orgasm. As a result of Harry's teasing, Malfoy had taught himself to experience a pseudo-climax without actually coming or losing hardness. Harry felt the excitement course through him, the constrained magic like electrical fire. He had moaned, "Oh Lucius, you're good."

Harry had long since slipped into first-name basis with his captive lover, liked to say it often, a name to be whispered and repeated. He could not complete his private shower-rituals without mouthing the name, over and over, as if the word and the rush of orgasm were inextricably linked.

Malfoy's face softened and he whispered, "Come here," in such a tone Harry couldn't resist, wanting to slide his burning mouth over Malfoy's lips, run his face over Malfoy's face, inhale the rough, magic-tainted scent of him.

No sooner had he come close Malfoy had snapped his teeth forward, missing Harry's lower lip by a mere fraction. Harry felt the lips and teeth graze over him before catching on his chin.

Harry dragged himself away, a spray of blood colouring Malfoy's chest and mouth.

"You know I will kill you boy," Malfoy had said, teeth bared, eyes wide with a madness Harry had not seen in them before, the red blood contrasting with his silver eyes and Harry's spunk against his skin.

With two fingers Harry had scooped up the sticky pearl fluid from Malfoy's chest and said, "First you must taste 8me8."

He had only meant to give Malfoy a stir for all his boasting about the prison-guard's come, its taste and flavor and how he would never allow Harry's near him.

Unexpectedly Malfoy had enclosed Harry's fingers in his mouth and suckled the spunk from them, and Harry could see from Malfoy's eyes that Harry tasted 8good8. He was erect within seconds.

Then Malfoy bit him again, and spoiled it all.

Another time the Warden thought it amusing to loosen the ropes just a little bit before Harry's arrival, and Malfoy had reared up whilst Harry was in the last, vulnerable strokes before peaking. Harry had thrust out his arm to push Malfoy back on the chair - the idea of stopping did not once cross his mind - and Malfoy had sunk his teeth into the soft flesh of Harry's forearm.

Deep in the throes of climax Harry did not feel the wound until after he'd pulled himself off Malfoy's still erect prick. Like the other times, Harry could not bring himself to heal the bite. For every time he touched it he could feel his own cock hardening with the memory, the pain a constant reminder of Malfoy's presence in his life. For 'pain' and 'Lucius Malfoy' were conjoined words in his vocabulary, one a synonym of the other

But Harry still had his one controlling element. Malfoy was still not permitted to ejaculate, not inside him, nor in his mouth or on his skin.

/8/8/8

"You are not to see him anymore," said Kingsley, and he held fast at the unbelievable wash of negative thoughts that emanated from Harry. Clearly, he had not forgotten that Harry was likely to become a powerful wizard in the fullness of time, equal to his headmaster...or their common enemy.

"In case it's skipped your notice, I'm not a child," Harry replied, his words low and quiet.

Kingsley heard the foreign lilt to Harry's voice, the plummy tones insinuating their way into Harry's flat London vowels.

The scattering of Occlumency training Harry had received last year let him catch Kingsley's wry thoughts, 8Oh, so you have been spending a lot of time with him.8

"Harry, well may you believe that you have a plaything locked up for all eternity, but we're talking a frighteningly well-connected man. Did it occur to you that already he is setting in place legal appeals for release?"

"No, I did not know that," said Harry through his clenched teeth.

"Lucius Malfoy was already tried and found not-guilty on the basis of his being under an Imperius curse fifteen years ago. His lawyers claim that those conditions are exactly the same today and you must understand that the Muggle clause of double indemnity holds true in the wizarding world as well."

"So he might be released soon?"

"Most definitely. He will also have questions about his treatment too."

Harry bit his lip and bent his head. Kingsley was the second person in the last twenty-four hours to bring up this subject.

/8/8/8

"It's rape, Harry, no matter which way you look at it. Rape! Going to that prison, making him do what he does not want...oh for Merlin's sake I can't begin to start saying where it's wrong. I mean, you're sixteen years old, all you're going to think through is your underparts, but oh my, Charlie should know better."

"This has got nothing to do with Charlie."

"Charlie's my son! Charlie is in love with you!

"I didn't ask him to be in love with me! It was only supposed to be about sex!"

Harry couldn't believe he was saying this to Ron's mum, but she was a woman with seven children, five of them adults, She was not an innocent. Molly Weasley rolled her eyes. There was no anger in her voice, only defeat and disappointment.

"Harry, you go to his bed every night, needy for love and affection and Charlie gives that to you, gives it with all his heart. How can a man not fall in love when so much of him is being poured into another?"

/8/8/8

How could they indeed?

Harry had wanted to scream at Molly, "Don't tell me about love! I know! I feel it every time I go to Azkaban, every time I see 8him8, every time he mocks me and tells me he has another and I am only an annoyance, a trifle, that he would rather I were gone and I feel it, I feel it destroy me. I know that love is nothing but the worst of all curses, because it doesn't kill you but even worse. It makes you wish you were DEAD!"

But Harry could only stand and look at Molly, shaking and inarticulate, and yet he was sure she'd heard every unspoken word.

"Oh Harry," she had said, her eyes, warm and sad. "You poor boy."

/8/8/8

"It's time to give the portkey knife back," said Kingsley. "That's the only way we can stop this."

"The knife was given as a gift. It's bound to me, I can't return it," Harry said, a touch desperately. He did not fully understand the etiquette of gift-giving in wizarding circles, but knew that a gift could not be returned.

"You can't return it. No. But on the dissolution of a relationship, the gift may be passed on. Charlie has told us that he will sacrifice any future happiness with you, and you may now give the gift to Tonks." Kingsley paused, as he let the truth sink into Harry, and the magic words work into the bonds of the knife, hidden away in Harry's boot. "Then she will give it to Charlie as her going-away gift, and he will return to his dragons."

The knife began to burn against Harry's ankle. It was no longer his to keep. He whipped it out, feeling a thin shred of skin stick to the hot surface.

He looked at Tonks with her hand out, pleading, at stern Kingsley, and then at Charlie's empty, resigned face. The too-warm little room crowded over him.

He grasped the haft of the steaming knife, oblivious to the scorching pain on his palm and screamed:

"Azkaban! AZKABAN!"

Nothing happened. He didn't go anywhere. The smell of burning flesh assaulted him.

Harry flung the knife at Tonks' feet, where it shattered into a hundred pieces. He ran for the door, and would have shoved Charlie aside had the older Weasley brother not moved quickly out of the way.

With his uninjured hand Harry flung open the door, and escaped into the smoky pub, tears streaming down his face. 


	5. Desolation

It was the muggle streets Harry escaped to, the place where half his brutish, non-magic blood had its origins.

For two days he wandered further from Diagon Alley, further from the hot, magical centre of existence and into the half-life that was the mundane world, the place without colour, without meaning, and without the memory of Lucius Malfoy.

Yet with his senses attuned to enchantment like raw nerves to pain, he saw the remnants in all things. The sideways glance from the man in the corner, covered by newspapers, the fanged hex from the old lady pushing a shopping trolley full of rubbish, the wand that slipped out of a child's pencil-case and rolled at his feet.

Holly-wood, like his own. The quicksilver splash of a few unicorn hairs softened the end. Harry picked it up and the instrument squirmed under his grip, knowing that Harry was not its master.

"Ta mate," said the boy, snatching it off Harry, then dashing across the road, narrowly missing a double-decker coming from the other side.

A terrible numbness filled him. The boy was his own kind, yet had not recognized Harry as such. Then Harry slowly understood why, as he saw the boy emerge again, this time battling with a huge trunk case from the rear of a taxi. Today was the first day of school term, and Harry was going to miss the train.

Yet he felt nothing at all. No regret, no sadness, nothing.

Harry turned away from the scene of the boy and the trunk as if it were rarely a mirage. Let the Express run without him, let the world just crumble and burn without him, let anything happen, for he cared no more than a stone cared if it is in the sun or the shade. He wanted no more then find someplace dark, somewhere to huddle and ossify into bone, to never ever be struck down by this desolation again.

He wondered on his aimless journey, the grey morning fading into a blur, like a film of grease over his awareness, a film threaded the wrong way. In the centre of it was loss, and heartbreak and silver-blond hair the same shade as a unicorn's tail or a knife blade. He had no reason any more, not if all those he loved -- Sirius with his soul -- Lucius with his body -- were taken from him.

His world closed in on him. He stumbled on...not searching anymore, or fleeing, just moving, the way dead things still shake and quiver even with their heads cut from them.

Blinks of encroaching horror insinuated their way into his mind.

Something sharp.

A tin-lid, rusted and serrated like sharks teeth.

A vision. Of pain, and blood.

"Avada..." he whispered. "Avada Kedavra..."

No wand, only this scrap of metal, but enough to wield the oldest magic of all, the taking of life...

Then blessed darkness without dream.

* * *

Wake up child. Oh wake up.

* * *

He woke, and smelt disinfectant.

"Awake then, honey?"

The blurry, white figure at the end of the bed came to his side and gently slid Harry's glasses back on his face. She stood back and smiled at him. A nurse. She reminded him a little of what Hermoine might look like in five years time, curly-headed and studious, with just the right amount of devilment to make her fun.

"Water," he croaked.

The nurse helped him with a tumbler of dull-tasting water. His hands had no strength. She knew this. She stroked his bandaged wrists and the sticking-plaster on his fingers where he had cut himself trying to hold the blood-slippery circle of tin. Ointment had been applied to the wound on his palm where the portkey had burnt him.

"Something must have caused you some grief for you to do this for yourself."

Harry nodded, weary.

"So then, Mister _Male Unknown,_ would you like to tell me where you're from? We looked in your pocket for I.D. and if you don't mind the necessary intrusion, all we got is your odd coin collection."

Then Harry remembered what had occurred preceding him coming here, and he closed in on himself, turning his head away from the friendly nurse.

"I'm nobody."

"Suit yourself sweetie. But you know, if you're in any sort of trouble it's here that the police look first."

The hospital was of the old public kind, everything painted in faded shades of industrial grey. A muggle hospital. Clearly no-one had noticed his disappearance yet, or if they had, they'd not been able to find him.

He wiggled his fingers gingerly, and felt the answering pain in his wrists. He had failed, and there was still pain, the greater pain inside him...

"And you've walked your feet into stumps. Honey, where were you trying to go?"

Why did she have to be so kind to him? He didn't want kindness. He wanted to be left alone with his agony.

Harry looked into the nurse's warm, brown eyes and saw in them a mother's caring. He couldn't deny her an answer.

"I was in love. He was taken from me."

"Ah," she said, nodding with understanding. "That is the oldest of all sorrows, to lose the one you love. Where is he now?"

"Gone," groaned Harry. He's gone."

"Did he die? I'm so sorry."

Harry blinked. "No, he's gone...home." How could he explain that with Lucius gone from his cell, that Harry was as cut off from him as life was to death?

"Home, then why wander about town so? Why don't you go to him?"

"Go to him?"

"You do know where he lives? I could call him if you want..."

"No, no," said Harry, even though his brain screamed, Oh god, oh god, you know where he lives...

He took the nurse's hand, even though there was no grip in his fingers. "Please, I need to make a phone call."

"And not tell me who you are? The charge nurse won't be very happy with me."

"Please."

She winked, and left the room. A few seconds later she returned with an old dial-phone, which she plugged in.

"I'll leave you alone for a few minutes, love. You do what you need to do."

"Thank you."

She smiled, her eyes bright and knowing. As she made to leave the ward she paused and said, "You know, when I was five, an owl once came to my brother."

Before Harry could speak, the nurse was gone.

* * *

He panted into the telephone. "What's the most magical place in Wiltshire?"

"What?" screamed Mrs Figg down the crackling line. "When all everyone's been doing is looking for you? When they've even turned up on your aunt and uncle's doorstep? What do you want to know that for?"

"I need to know," he said. "If you don't tell me I'm never coming back, and if you tell anyone I asked I'll never forgive you. Where is it?"

"Oh, I'm going to regret this, but Wiltshire's got the most magical places anywhere." She paused, gathering her breath. "Of those there's the place Merlin made."

"What place is that?" he demanded.

"Stonehenge."

* * *

Luckily his clothes were still under his bed, folded up and placed into a plastic bag. He dressed quickly. Tucking his sleeves over his bandaged wrists, he left the hospital in the company of a large, raucous family who had come to visit a sick relative. Once out on the street he bolted for the nearest major road.

The rain was falling steadily. Without thinking on how he would pay for his journey, Harry flagged down the first taxi that came his way.

The interior was warm and dry, smelling of air-freshener and stale beer. The driver, an old man with a beard in a net and this bright blue turban on his head, peered at Harry in the back seat.

"Running away lad?"

"What makes you think that?" asked Harry defensively.

"The hospital. People run away from it every day. Of course, you still have your patient tag on your wrist."

Blushing, Harry tore off the tag with its _Male Unknown, DOB approximately 18 years_. So they had thought him older.

"Where to?"

"Wiltshire. Amesbury, I think."

"That's a bit of a journey. Two hour trip. Are you sure you don't want to take the bus?"

Harry dug in his pocket for the few remaining galleons he had with his lint.

"I have...um, gold."

The driver winked, and took two of the galleons from Harry's palm, and giving him a sickle in change.

Harry stared at the driver's sickle, open-mouthed. A muggle driver had just given him wizarding change.

The driver smiled into the rear mirror and pulled away from the curb. "Understand this. There is not a secret in this whole wide world that is not known to a taxi driver. Amesbury it is."

Harry lay back in the seat, suddenly aware that there was so much more to his life that he did not know.

* * *

The taxi driver dropped him off not at town, but at Stonehenge itself, the crooked, incomplete ring of stones in a field, barely a minute's walk from the road. He knew what Harry was, where folk like him really wanted to go.

"The town's just a few miles that way. It'll be dark soon. You'll want to find yourself some shelter before then."

I will," said Harry, climbing out of the cab. He waved the driver on, before following the path to the ancient structure.

The sun was dipping low on the horizon, making the stones loom and cast long shades. A couple of tourists murmured about the cold and left the circle, leaving Harry alone with the massive sarsens. Their power seemed to thrum with a low basso energy, leaving his sinuses aching and his insides queasy.

The surrounding fields were empty. He had been so sure...

When the sun finally disappeared, and the lights came in the distant houses, Harry felt his breath catch. For ever so slowly his magic-senses were peering through the mists of reality that had been thrown up to confound and mislead the muggles who passed through here in such a number. A house was in one of the fields, but a house like he had never seem before, a structure not unlike a abbey, with squat, rough columns and twisted, feral arches, heavy with leering, carved stone faces.

Harry walked in the drizzling mist to the crooked steps that led to the landing, feeling the age of this place through the soles of his shoes, a span of time so incomprehensibly long that just to think of it hurt him.

One of the two stone doors were ajar, as if in welcome - or entrapment.

He stepped into the mansion, the cold breeze from the door whickering against his skin. He shut the door, felt the slight pressure in his ears as the doors closed in on this immense, self contained space. And yet there was still a breeze coming from somewhere. A movement in the impossibly high columns.

The mansion's interiors were built on a huge scale, the sepulchral architecture belying much older and different purposes from that of a house. The tall stones set in a ring around the immense foyer were of the same blue-grey mineral as the Stonehenge sarsen stones, inlayed with slices of a foreign green obsidian at such an exact, seamless join that no non-magic technology of present or past could have cut so fine.

The gloomy light caught and dispersed along the columns, and in the dark high places things moves and breathed, their eyes no more than sparks and glints like stars in a foreboding sky.

Throughout the mansion was the stink, of dark magic, of the heady soporific miasma creeping from gaps in the floor, a formless thing with hackles and fangs and claws, rubbing against Harry lasciviously, smearing his clothes with reek and damp.

_What do you want?_

"Lucius," he whispered, the sound lost to the immeasurable darkness. The stones were listening, those thirsty monoliths that had once been washed in sacrificial blood. _Lucius_ said the echo in return. There was a scrabble of claws against stone, like the sound of bottle caps clinking against glass. Did house elves have claws? Did they really communicate in such high squeaks, like rodents, verminous and filthy?

Then came the earthier sounds of stone grinding against stone, ancient mechanica moving within the impenetrable walls, ancient iron cogs turning gravity-driven chains, sending counterweights falling into bottomless wells, displacing cold air from underground strata that had never seen sunlight except at the very beginning of time.

His awareness skittered over the machinery in the walls and the dark magic rising from the floor and the strange servants like a stone might skip over the flat surface of a pond before being swallowed into its depths.

A fear gripped him, fear that had a flavour, a shape, a discernable weight and pressure beyond Azkaban's amorphous despair. Just by standing here Harry knew that Lucius Malfoy's sophistication, his effete nobility, his arrogance were all just smoke and mirrors, misdirection from a darker core.

This house was proof of the ancestral evil that had so attracted Voldemort, this abyssal stone almost-castle. How could an orphan half-blood like Tom Riddle not have been drawn to this place, how could he not have been maddened by envy coursing through his veins as twenty years ago he had stood here, in the dark, amongst these blood hungry stones?

"How dare you defile my home."

Harry's breath expelled from him in a cloud of steam. The temperature had plummeted several degrees in seconds, the stones responding to the master of the house.

He could not turn around. Wanted to turn. But was immobilized...from fear, from the threat of pain...and because the magic of this place had seeped into him, the same scent that Lucius Malfoy exuded always, from his sweat and his skin and his breath.

Harry's desperate arousal was evident. But there were no guards here, no ropes, no chains, nothing but his helpless, wandless self.

But Harry had chosen this. To face him. Else he could not face living.

"I said, how dare you come here and defile my home? Is it enough that I was subjugated before you that you should take this disgrace here?"

"I can't..." Harry gasped to the dark and listening, awful stones. "I can't bear..." His voce was like gravel and glass, gargled with wormwood and ichor.

I can't bear your hatred when I need you so.

How could anyone bear the pain that he bore? Harry coughed out what he had to say, else the words would fester in his body and wound him.

"I can't bear to be without you. I had to come here."

Malfoy did not speak, and when he did, the reply dripped with venom.

"You think your fancies concern me? There are so many more prisoners for you to spill your perversions into."

Malfoy's hatred seemed to strike Harry and flay him open. The house felt his pain, and the magic smell deepened with anticipation. How often in the long, brutal history of this place had the killing blow been wielded by the most beloved of the victim? How often had the blood spill been preceded by a cry of betrayal?

Harry forced himself to turn, and his breath caught in his throat and if the very air was full of barbs and razors. Malfoy might have been intimidating in Azkaban, but this was his home, his element. His silver-blond hair echoed the colour of the mica particles glinting in the stone, the pale skin was the rippled quartz inclusions in the granite columns, his eyes were the blue-grey of the sarsens.

Harry's heart fisted against his ribs, as if an animal was in his chest, biting and clawing against the muscle and bone hurting him.

"It was foolish of you to come here."

"I don't care any more." Harry held out his wrists and his knife-burnt palm as if they were evidence of his agony, of how far he had fallen, of how much further he was prepared to go. He undid the bandages, let them fall. The cuts inflicted during from his desperate attempt to escape his pain had been so frenzied and violent, his inner arms were blue-black from bruise. The stitches were like black insects crowding on the tracks of the wounds.

Malfoy's eyes slitted as he peered at Harry's sliced arms. "No magic has touched those. The wounds will scar."

"I don't care. Perhaps I should have written your name into my arms, because if you cut me open now the name would be written on every part of me."

Malfoy began to move -- not towards him, but _around_ him, as if ascribing a circle about Harry's wretched body, an invisible barrier beyond which he was unable to pass.

"You are aware of what I told you I would do if you came to me, did I not?"

Harry swallowed and nodded. His erection was forcing up against the waistband of his trousers. A lingering discomfort made him all the more conscious of his prick, the organ still chafed and sore from previous, arduous moments of self-pleasure. In the last week Harry had needed to approach mutilation to tear the climax from his body, because of late nothing less than absolute torture could break through his anguish.

When his speech came from him it was as if his body was being torn from the inside to force the words out. "Can't you see what you've done to me Lucius? Can't you see what my life is without you? Can't you see I'd rather be dead then not have you, always?"

Malfoy strode forward, covering the distance in a few strides, and before Harry knew what was happening he swung a backhand against Harry, sending him sprawling. His glasses fell from his face, and the chime of breaking glass sounded throughout the awful silence.

Before Harry could hunt for his glasses, Malfoy had seized him by his shoulders and dragged him upright. With a physical strength one rarely saw in the wizarding kind he was thrown upon an altar stone, a block of dolomite as big as the Weasley's kitchen table. Harry struggled to sit up, but another powerful slap had him swooning against the rough surface.

Malfoy dragged Harry up by the lapels of his jacket and snarled in his ear, "You _raped_ me there, you _humiliated_ me, you took away what pride I had left in myself and still you come to me sniveling for affection?"

Dazed, Harry could only murmur in protest when Malfoy hit him again, a stinging slap to the side of his face that shocked him awake.

Harry grappled for Malfoy's hand and began to suckle both Malfoy's first and second finger the way he would have his cock, if he could. Malfoy grabbed Harry's wrist and ran his tongue over the knotted stitches, tasting Harry's emotional enslavement to him. The hatred on Malfoy's face was replaced with confusion, that emotion that always threatened to surface during their forced lovemaking. Harry knew what Malfoy could taste in Harry's wounds. The desolation of love, the sacrament to agony in that desecrated skin, the unbearable quickening towards death rather than existence within this caged longing.

All these feelings were transubstiated by magic into a potent sensation, harsh and uncontrollable.

Harry submitted to Malfoy yanking his jacket and t-shirt over his head, before leaning forward to trace with his tongue the old scar on Harry's skin left behind by his teeth, to place a new one on the other nipple, cement his ownership in the way only the darkest magic demands, tasting Harry's blood, letting it run over his trembling, sweating body into the thirsty stone.

Harry writhed and wept. With his hurting, injured hands he clawed and Malfoy's arms, Malfoy's face, Malfoy's shoulders, wanting to hold on, possess and never let go. He tore open the black silk shirt and dug his fingers into the muscular span of Malfoy's chest, bringing the fingers back to his mouth and sucking the heady salt of Malfoy's sweat from them.

Malfoy grabbed Harry's shoes and pulled them off, before unbuckling the belt of Harry's trousers and tugging them off his legs in one stroke. Harry's stiffened prick fell against his stomach, swollen and sticky with sweat, pre-come and the unguent he had used in obtaining his last climax. Malfoy grabbed Harry's ankles and dragged him down the altar-stone, making _sure_ that Harry's buttocks were grazed against the sharp quartz nodules. When his rear was hanging over the end Malfoy pulled his organ from his strides, dark purple and huge before impaling Harry in one vicious movement that both of them sounded in pain, Malfoy's groan lost to Harry's scream.

Malfoy punished him, throwing his weight into each thrust, making Harry's back grind and rasp against the stone, tearing his unprepared ring, bruising Harry's thighs with clenching, brutal fingers and yet Harry's erection did not falter, and his gasps of pain were altering in their timbre, deepening into long, harsh moans.

"Lucius," he gasped, "Lucius, Lucius."

Malfoy's sudden roar of climax frightened Harry, not so much as the way the seed seemed to steam and burn its way inside him, soaking into his membranes, his organs and his blood, but the way his own peak burst from him along with his scream. Harry writhed and contorted, impaled upon Malfoy's prick as the orgasm tore through his body, racing from nerve to cell to brain and making the whole world explode in white with edges of crimson.

As the colours subsided with his sobs, Malfoy's tongue and lips were on his chest again, nuzzling through the pearlescent spill, the bite on his nipple stinging from the salt. The kiss was unexpected, furious and violent, his come and his blood mingling with the taste of Malfoy's mouth, that mouth that had taunted him, that had filled him with jealousy and rage and lust. Harry suckled and bit and ravished that angry mouth, excited beyond measure at his own taste on Malfoy's lips and tongue. Already he was growing hard again.

Malfoy's pupils were huge and dark with yearning, with only a rim of silver showing, his breath steaming through him with such tidal force that he was unable to talk, his mind clearly fired-over with madness and indignant arousal.

"You are a disease boy...your face haunts me, your skin burns me when I touch it, even now the touch of a lover is spoilt by this foul craving you've caused in me. You've ruined me and I hate you for it and I would kill you if it did not mean my losing the change of fucking you again...and again..."

Harry realized that that it was not his voice speaking those words, it was Malfoy's voice. He submitted with gasps of relief when he was pulled upright and the head of Malfoy's prick slid between his teeth -- magic-cleaned but he would have taken it anyway, regardless of muck or mutilation. Malfoy's hands were tight in his hair, holding him, controlling the movement, but he had no need. Harry tongued and swallowed Malfoy's penis with desperate abandon, clasping his lover's buttocks tight to him. The stitches on his wrist-wounds pulled and jagged, they streamed burgundy blood down Malfoy's hips and thighs.

The power of the stones flowed through Malfoy and the older man gave a shout -- animalistic and bestial -- and the hot semen filled Harry's mouth with musk and salt and darkness.

Malfoy dragged Harry away from his still-swollen maleness by his hair, stood him upright for long enough to meet Harry's eyes, to possess Harry's swollen, come-damp lips with his own, penetrate that mouth that tasted of spunk and blood and saliva with a course, violent tongue, before he struck the boy across the face again, sending him sprawling face first on the stone. Harry groaned as fingers penetrated him, jagged his ring wide, wide enough for a probing tongue to caress and titillate his entry.

Harry ground his aching prick into the rough stone, moaning, letting the sounds of his pain and arousal escape him. Malfoy turned him over with such violence Harry felt his shoulders graze and bleed, yet his prick strained upwards, wanting...needing...

When Malfoy's mouth enclosed him, Harry let out as shriek of triumph and surrender. No pleasure, no pain, no feeling in the world was equal to this molten orifice that surrounded his chafed prick. He screamed Lucius' name again and again, and when he climaxed one last time he knew with all his being what it was to be on the precipice of death and not fall. His fingers scraped the stone until blood-bruises welled up from underneath his nails.

"More," he gasped, "More Lucius, kill me, kill me..." His last syllables rose to a scream as the last shudders of his orgasm tore him apart. His arse was a void of emptiness wanting only to be filled.

The older man stepped back, his prick not yet limp, but his cruel Malfoy mind exerting control.

"Oh, but you would infect me with that longing of yours," Malfoy said. "You would convince me that no other man shared such an obsession with my flesh as you."

Harry sat up, trembling, not yet sated. "None do."

"But you would be wrong," Malfoy continued, "For there was one who loved me with such fierceness it was as if the world would be torn asunder were I to deny him."

Who else, but a creature of such malignant darkness that even Lucius Malfoy felt he had met his match?

"Voldemort," said Harry, and from his mouth the word lost all power, sounding only like an accusation.

"You shall not speak his name," hissed Malfoy. "He was more than you."

"He was not. It was only your blood and your power he wanted, when I want your very flesh, and soul."

"You will take care in what you ask for boy," grated Malfoy, his thick, veined organ becoming erect again. I will give you your death and your pain, and oh yes, you will have my flesh too."

Harry stared at Malfoy's erection with such covetousness, his breath wheezing and his tongue moistening his mouth, the magic as thick as mucus about him.

His whisper was almost imperceptible, but the whole house, from the high eves and catwalks, to the measureless depths of the wells resounded in his word. _Please_.

To his surprise and despair he saw Malfoy button himself up behind his strides, and in one fluid motion throw Harry's clothes at him.

"I have just received visitors. To the fireplace upstairs. I'm sure they would not want to see you in your condition."

"I'm not getting dressed," said Harry firmly. "I'm staying here."

Malfoy bared his teeth and strode towards Harry, and Harry readied himself for another blow, prepared to endure any physical pain if only he did not have to be separated from his lover.

Instead, Malfoy grabbed Harry's jaw and held hard, his fingers digging into his flesh. "You will get dressed boy, and you will be in a fit condition to be seen when they come down."

With that Malfoy kissed Harry, hard, biting Harry's tongue and lips with cruel passion, suggesting brutality far and beyond what he'd been shown tonight.

Harry moaned, tried to hold Malfoy to him with his weak hands. Malfoy thrust him away. "You do not want what I have to give you. Get dressed."

* * *

Kingsley, Tonks and Charlie glances at each other nervously. To be here was to be in the dragon's lair itself.

Kingsley was old enough to remember how much time Voldemort had spent in the Malfoy house, in the days before his grab for power. The coiling, destructive forces of Valdemort's dark magic still existed in this mansion. He could smell it, feel it, and fear it, all at once. The younger Tom Riddle had been drawn to this place like water to its lowest level, and it was whispered in dark circles that the dark wizard had developed an attachment to the much younger Lucius that was more perversion than passion.

Was it any wonder that Harry, heir apparent to Voldemort's power, should be as infatuated as his forebear to this pale creature?

Perhaps, thought Kingsley as he looked around at the distorted, evil crafts that filled the study -- the icons and reliquaries to old gods, the thumbscrews, the devices of inquisition and torture, the phials and apothecarial instruments, the dried heads and the evidence of foreign fetish-magic -- they had been wrong to try and tear Harry away from this man. The attraction was too great. If Harry was to go, he would need to go willingly or keep coming back like a migratory creature, a being enslaved by his own internal rhythms.

Malfoy arrived a few minutes after their arrival to the study, long enough to keep them waiting uneasily, but short enough time for them not to be curious and start looking through all the books in the library alcove.

The master of the house entered the room as silent as the breeze sighing throughout the passages. Only Charlie caught the scent of Harry on Malfoy's skin.

"Where is he?" Charlie demanded. "I swear Malfoy, if I find you've done anything to him."

Malfoy did not deign to reply, and this concerned Kingsley all the more. "This way." Malfoy said. "The boy has not left the foyer."

On traversing the wide stone stairway and seeing the boy sitting on one of the sarsens, Kingsley let out a sigh of relief. He was prepared for anything -- even the boy's corpse spread out cold and lifeless on the floor.

"Harry?" he said, mustering as much tenderness as he could into his normally authoritarian voice. "It's good to find you again, lad."

Harry looked at Kingsley with a hurt, abject stare, and the tall wizard recoiled. All of a sudden he realized how premature he had been in thinking Harry safe. Harry was damaged, utterly damaged, from the skin and all the way in, from the ragged, bleeding scars at his wrists, the swollen jaw and the magenta bites at his neck, to the crust of blood, saliva and semen across his cheek.

And yet the flash of hatred was not towards the perpetrator of this obvious _rape_ but towards Kingsley and Tonks and Charlie. For coming here. For interrupting a ritual that clearly had only one denouement.

Charlie ran towards Harry and took the boy's limp hands, caressed the blank face and wrapped a protective arm over Harry's slouching shoulder.

"You MONSTER," He shouted at the pale figure that stood at the top of the stairwell. "What have you done to him?"

Charlie reached for his wand. Both Kingsley and Tonks shouted out at once - "No!"

The elder Weasley brother clenched his hands and stood still, although from the rage on his face a person would be hard pressed if it was his own will or another's that stayed his hand. "Monster," he hissed under his breath. "Monster, oh Merlin, I will kill him for what he's done."

"Harry," urged Tonks. "What happened? You can tell us. You're safe -- nothing can happen to you."

Harry turned his head from her, but not before a stranger glared back at her through those green eyes, an adult whose opinions and convictions would not be altered.

"Potter says that he is ready to go back to school, and that is where you are going to take him," said Malfoy from the top of the stairway.

Only now did Harry startle out of his torpor.

"No," he said, standing up, not quite flinching but certainly avoiding Charlie's fretful touch. "I'm not going to school. I'm staying here."

"Harry," moaned Charlie. "He's enchanted you, put some kind of spell on you. You don't know what you're saying."

Kingsley laid a hand on Charlie's arm to silence the dragon handler. "Lucius is right Harry. You need to go back to school."

Harry's eyes were bright with alarm. If he was sent back to Hogwarts he could not leave, he would be trapped for a whole year...

"No, Lucius, _tell_ them," groaned Harry, making a dash for the stairs. Kingsley caught the young wizard's gashed wrist and held on, feeling the bones move under the blood slippery skin.

"Kingsley let me go...Lucius." Harry's pleas were frantic. He pulled against Kingsley's grip without heed to the wounds tearing against the stitches and opening up again. "Let me go to him!"

"Tonks, the blasted portkey!" cried Kingsley, for despite his injuries, Harry's exertions were powerful with grief. Tonks withdrew Charlie's knife from her boot and ran to the struggling pair, collecting a dazed Charlie on the way.

"Oh Merlin," she gasped, "anywhere but here! Hogsmeade!"

The hooks grabbed them and _pulled_.

The last thing Harry saw, as he was surrounded by a whirling darkness was Malfoy's face contorted with an unreadable emotion, his shoulders stooped as if taking up an insurmountable weight, before burying his head into his two hands.

It was at that moment Harry knew with a certainty as solemn as a prayer that he had not lost Malfoy at all. Not at all. Lucius had done just as he said he was, been infected by Harry, was scarred and haunted by him.

Maybe even in love with him.

Whatever the outcome, their painful, remarkable relationship had only just begun.

-Fin-


End file.
